Speaker
Description
The GlueX experiment at Jefferson Lab aims to study the light meson spectrum with an emphasis on the search for hybrid exotic mesons. A tagged photon beam, with energies in the range 3—11.6 GeV, and linearly polarized near 8.5 GeV, is incident on a hydrogen target inside a detector with near-complete neutral and charged particle coverage. The experiment has completed its first phase of data taking, producing orders of magnitude more data than previous photoproduction experiments in this energy regime. A good theoretical description of the production mechanisms will be needed to interpret any potential signals for exotic mesons. Photoproduction data on conventional mesons are very useful for this purpose, where polarization observables and the energy and t-dependence of production cross sections provide complementary information. We present new, high-statistics extractions of polarization observables and cross sections in photoproduction of vector mesons at GlueX and discuss the implications for our understanding of the production mechanisms.
