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[PAST EVENT] Physics Colloquium - Mattione
February 26, 2016
4pm - 5pm
Abstract:
QCD, the theory of the strong nuclear force, describes how quarks are bound together by gluons to form hadrons, which are particles such as the proton and neutron. Hybrid mesons are a type of hadron that are predicted to consist of a quark-antiquark pair, bound together by a gluonic field that is in an excited state. A rich spectrum of hybrid meson states has been predicted, but only a few experiments have reported evidence of their existence. Measuring the spectrum of these states will provide valuable information on the gluonic degrees of freedom of QCD in the quark-confinement regime.
The GlueX experiment at Jefferson Lab is specifically designed to search for and measure the spectrum of hybrid mesons. For the experiment, a 12 GeV electron beam incident on a diamond radiator is used to produce a linearly-polarized, coherent bremsstrahlung tagged-photon beam with a coherent peak at 9 GeV. The linearly-polarized photon beam is incident on a proton target located within the hermetic GlueX detector, which is capable of detecting many different final states to which the hybrid mesons are predicted to decay. Early physics data from the GlueX commissioning will be shown, demonstrating the readiness of GlueX for full physics running, which is scheduled to begin this Fall.
QCD, the theory of the strong nuclear force, describes how quarks are bound together by gluons to form hadrons, which are particles such as the proton and neutron. Hybrid mesons are a type of hadron that are predicted to consist of a quark-antiquark pair, bound together by a gluonic field that is in an excited state. A rich spectrum of hybrid meson states has been predicted, but only a few experiments have reported evidence of their existence. Measuring the spectrum of these states will provide valuable information on the gluonic degrees of freedom of QCD in the quark-confinement regime.
The GlueX experiment at Jefferson Lab is specifically designed to search for and measure the spectrum of hybrid mesons. For the experiment, a 12 GeV electron beam incident on a diamond radiator is used to produce a linearly-polarized, coherent bremsstrahlung tagged-photon beam with a coherent peak at 9 GeV. The linearly-polarized photon beam is incident on a proton target located within the hermetic GlueX detector, which is capable of detecting many different final states to which the hybrid mesons are predicted to decay. Early physics data from the GlueX commissioning will be shown, demonstrating the readiness of GlueX for full physics running, which is scheduled to begin this Fall.