Studying the Interplay of Strong and Electromagnetic Forces in Heavy Ion Collisions with NICA
In the following we stress the advantages of the NICA research programme in the context of studying the spectator-induced electromagnetic phenomena present in proton-nucleus and heavy ion collisions. We point at the specific interest of using these phenomena as a new, independent source of information on the space-time evolution of the reaction and of the non-perturbative process of particle production. We propose an extended series of measurements of well-defined observables to be performed in different types of nuclear reactions and in the whole range of collision energies available to NICA. We expect these measurements to bring very valuable new insight into the mechanism of non-perturbative strong interactions, complementary to the studies made at the SPS at CERN, RHIC at BNL, and the LHC.