The search for "exotic" hadrons, those which cannot be described as simple mesons or baryons, has yielded several new multi-quark states over the past decade which are broadening our understanding of the strong interaction. "Hybrid" mesons, where excitations of the gluonic field of the meson directly contribution to its quantum number, are expected to provide unique insight into the properties of the gluonic field responsible for quark confinement. The GlueX experiment is a fixed target photoproduction experiment located in the newly-constructed Hall D at Jefferson Lab, designed to identify and study the spectrum of hybrid mesons. GlueX is also well equipped to study a wide range of topics in hadronic physics including strangeonum and hyperon spectoscopy, and charmonium photo-production near threshold. In this talk, I will discuss the status of this experiment, and describe several of the first preliminary physics results from our commissioning run in Spring 2016, including the first observation of charm-quark production at Jefferson Lab.

Argonne Physics Division Seminar Schedule