The GlueX Experiment: Recent Results and Future Plans

TL;DR

The GlueX experiment at Jefferson Lab aims to discover exotic hybrid mesons and improve understanding of meson production mechanisms using high-energy polarized photon beams, with recent results on asymmetries and pentaquark searches.

Contribution

This paper reports new experimental results on meson production asymmetries and pentaquark candidate searches, advancing the understanding of hadronic states and production mechanisms.

Findings

Refined understanding of pseudoscalar meson production asymmetries.

Constraints on heavy quark photoproduction models from J/ψ data.

Search for pentaquark states in photoproduction.

Abstract

The GlueX experiment, located in experimental Hall D of Jefferson Lab, seeks to map the spectrum of light mesons in search of exotic hybrid mesons, a predicted class of hadronic states with explicit gluonic degrees of freedom. GlueX is a photoproduction experiment utilizing a linearly polarized photon beam at $E_\gamma=$ 8-9 GeV and a large acceptance spectrometer. The experiment has already collected orders of magnitude more data than previous experiments at similar energies. We show results on asymmetry measurements in the production of pseudoscalars mesons, which refine our understanding of production mechanisms in photoproduction at our energies. We also present results on $J/\psi$ photoproduction, which provides model constraints on heavy quark photoproduction and the ability to search for s-channel production of pentaquark candidate $P_c^+$ states.