GlueX: The Search for Gluonic Excitations at Jefferson Laboratory

TL;DR

The GlueX experiment at Jefferson Laboratory aims to discover and study exotic hybrid mesons with gluonic excitations using high-energy polarized photon beams, providing crucial data to understand quark confinement in QCD.

Contribution

This paper details the design and planned execution of the GlueX experiment, including the use of polarized photon beams and a hermetic detector at Jefferson Laboratory to advance hybrid meson spectroscopy.

Findings

Preparation of the GlueX experimental setup is underway.

Projected data collection will vastly exceed previous photoproduction experiments.

The experiment aims to identify gluonic excitations in mesons.

Abstract

One of the unanswered and most fundamental questions in physics regards the nature of the confinement mechanism of quarks and gluons in quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Exotic hybrid mesons manifest gluonic degrees of freedom and their detailed spectroscopy will provide the precision data necessary to test assumptions in lattice QCD and the specific phenomenology leading to confinement. Photoproduction is expected to be a particularly effective manner to produce exotic hybrids, however, existing data using photon beams are sparse. At Jefferson Laboratory, plans are underway by the GlueX Collaboration to use the coherent bremsstrahlung technique to produce a linearly polarized photon beam. A solenoid-based hermetic detector will be used to collect data on meson production and decays with statistics that will exceed existing photoproduction data by several orders of magnitude after the first year of running. In order to reach the ideal photon energy of 9 GeV required for these studies, the energy of the Jefferson Laboratory electron accelerator, CEBAF, will be doubled from its current maximum energy of 6 GeV to 12 GeV. The physics motivating the search and the status of the project are reviewed.