Imaging the initial condition of heavy-ion collisions and nuclear structure across the nuclide chart

A major goal of the hot QCD program, the extraction of the properties of the quark gluon plasma (QGP), is currently limited by our poor knowledge of the initial condition of the QGP, in particular how it is shaped from the colliding nuclei. To attack this limitation, we propose to exploit collisions of selected species to precisely assess how the initial condition changes under variations of the structure of the colliding ions. This knowledge, combined with event-by-event measures of particle correlations in the final state of heavy-ion collisions, will provide in turn a new way to probe the collective structure of nuclei, and to confront and exploit the predictions of state-of-the-art ab initio nuclear structure theories. The US nuclear community should capitalize on this interdisciplinary connection by pursuing collisions of well-motivated species at high-energy colliders.