The JET Collaboration is a five-year theoretical effort to understand the properties of the extraordinarily hot and dense state of matter known as the quark-gluon plasma. The quark-gluon plasma filled the Universe a few millionths of a second after the big bang but instantly vanished, condensing into the protons and neutrons and other particles from which the present Universe descended.

The BEST Collaboration, involving collaborators from two national laboratories and 11 universities, will construct and provide a theoretical framework for interpreting the results from the ongoing Beam Energy Scan program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The main goals of this program are to discover, or put constraints on the existence, of a critical point in the QCD phase diagram, and to locate the onset of chiral symmetry restoration by observing correlations related to anomalous hydrodynamic effects in quark gluon plasma.

We discuss the angular dependence of the recently proposed transverse momentum dependent quark and gluon diffractive parton distributions at small-x. We introduce the diffractive versions of the Sivers function and the elliptic gluon Wigner distribution and evaluate them in simple models with gluon saturation and study their geometric scaling properties.

The mission of the Topical Collaboration on Nuclear Theory for Double Beta Decay and Fundamental Symmetries (the DBD Collaboration), which involves nine universities and two national labs, is to use theoretical nuclear physics to address questions about fundamental particles and symmetries.

The project aims at analyzing the data of experimental collaborations (such as GlueX at Jefferson Lab), and advance theoretical frameworks for the accurate prediction of nuclear interactions and properties of nuclear matter.

The mission of the Topical Collaboration on Nuclear Theory for New Physics (NTNP) is to address outstanding theoretical questions related to the “targeted program of fundamental symmetries and neutrino research that opens new doors to physics beyond the Standard Model” (2015 NSAC Long Range Plan).

The QGT Collaboration has a main goal of spearheading understanding and discovery in the quark and gluon tomography of hadrons, as well as the origin of their mass and spin.

The SURGE Collaboration aims at the discovery and exploration of the gluon saturation regime in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) by advancing calculations to high precision and developing a comprehensive framework that allows comparison to a wide range of experimental data from hadron/ion colliders, and make predictions for the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC).

The Jet Energy-loss Tomography with a Statistically and Computationally Advanced Program Envelope (JETSCAPE) collaboration is an NSF funded multi-institutional effort to design the next generation of event generators to simulate the physics of ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions.

The newly established Network for Neutrinos, Nuclear Astrophysics, and Symmetries Physics Frontier Center will reveal new information about the physics in extreme astrophysical environments, allowing scientists to address major questions in physics and multi-messenger astrophysics.

The Collaboration for Advanced Modeling of Particle Accelerators (CAMPA) combines accelerator physicists from Berkeley Lab, Fermilab, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and the University of California, Los Angeles, with computer scientists from the SciDAC Math Institutes at Berkeley Lab, Argonne National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Through the innovative ECP project, 6 major labs have been working to deliver breakthrough modeling and simulation solutions that analyze more data in less time and provide insights and answers to the most critical U.S. challenges in scientific discovery, energy assurance, economic competitiveness, and national security.