  The Solenoidal Large Intensity Device (SoLID) is a new experimental apparatus
planned for Hall A at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility
(JLab). SoLID will combine large angular and momentum acceptance with the
capability to handle very high data rates at high luminosity. With a slate of
approved high-impact physics experiments, SoLID will push JLab to a new limit
at the QCD intensity frontier that will exploit the full potential of its 12
GeV electron beam. In this paper, we present an overview of the rich physics
program that can be realized with SoLID, which encompasses the tomography of
the nucleon in 3-D momentum space from Semi-Inclusive Deep Inelastic Scattering
(SIDIS), expanding the phase space in the search for new physics and novel
hadronic effects in parity-violating DIS (PVDIS), a precision measurement of
$J/\psi$ production at threshold that probes the gluon field and its
contribution to the proton mass, tomography of the nucleon in combined
coordinate and momentum space with deep exclusive reactions, and more. To meet
the challenging requirements, the design of SoLID described here takes full
advantage of recent progress in detector, data acquisition and computing
technologies. In addition, we outline potential experiments beyond the
currently approved program and discuss the physics that could be explored
should upgrades of CEBAF become a reality in the future.
