Strange Mesons and Gluonic Excitations
- College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA (United States); College of William & Mary
In the standard model of particle physics, the interactions between the fundamental constituents of nuclear matter, quarks and gluons, are governed by the theory of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). A central goal of nuclear physics is to understand how hadrons, such as protons and neutrons, are formed from these underlying quark and gluon degrees of freedom. A hadron is primarily constructed from three quarks or a quark-antiquark pair; however, the theory of QCD allows for much more exotic configurations. One of the predicted exotic configurations is known as a hybrid meson, which contains an excited gluonic field in addition to the usual quark-antiquark pair. This project aims to search for and study these gluonic excitations using the Gluonic Excitation (GlueX) experiment at Jefferson Lab in Newport News, VA. The discovery potential of the experiment will be significantly extended by studying the quark flavor composition of the meson spectrum through the completion and use of an enhanced detector to identify mesons containing strange quarks. The unprecedented statistical precision of the data collected at GlueX will allow us to search for a pattern of light-quark hybrid mesons, providing new insight into the interactions that bind the fundamental quarks and gluons into the hadrons we observe in nature.
- Research Organization:
- College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Nuclear Physics (NP)
- DOE Contract Number:
- SC0018224
- OSTI ID:
- 2327019
- Report Number(s):
- DOE-WM--0018224
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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