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Motivation

Our long-time colleague Jacques Soffer passed away recently. Jacques was a tireless supporter and advocate of the RHIC spin program from its very beginnings, and his abiding interest in polarization phenomena in high-energy scattering goes back even much longer. Jacques has made numerous seminal contributions to the program that range from deep theoretical insights into nucleon spin structure all the way to phenomenological predictions for polarized pp collider physics that guided the RHIC experiments.

He was among the first to point out the outstanding opportunities that the violation of parity in nature provides for probing nucleon spin structure at RHIC. His work on the "positivity" of parton distributions has become a milestone for the field and today is regarded as a foundation of our understanding of nucleon structure. Jacques also made invaluable predictions for pp elastic scattering at RHIC, which have shaped the way we do polarimetry at RHIC.

Much of what has come to fruition at RHIC in its nearly two decades of running is associated with Jacques's contributions. We feel that it is timely to remember, commemorate, and honor his pioneering role in making spin physics at RHIC a reality. We think that this is done most appropriately by a scientific symposium. The symposium will assess the impact of RHIC spin on our understanding of the spin structure of the proton, highlighting Jacques's contributions. It will also address how the achievements at RHIC spin set the basis for a future electron-ion collider.

We anticipate the following topics and sessions for the symposium:

• RHIC spin results on longitudinal and transverse spin
• Polarized parton distributions and the proton spin
• W/Z boson production
• Elastic scattering at high energies
• The road to an electron ion collider