An initial study of mesons and baryons containing strange quarks with GlueX

Understand

The primary motivation of the GlueX experiment is to search for and ultimately study the pattern of gluonic excitations in the meson spectrum produced in $\gamma p$ collisions.

• Recent lattice QCD calculations predict a rich spectrum of hybrid mesons that have both exotic and non-exotic $J^{PC}$, corresponding to $q\bar{q}$ states ($q=u,$ $d,$ or $s$) coupled with a gluonic field.
• A thorough study of the hybrid spectrum, including the identification of the isovector triplet, with charges 0 and $\pm1$, and both isoscalar members, $|s\bar{s}\ >$ and $|u\bar{u}\ > + |d\bar{d}\ >$, for each predicted hybrid combination of $J^{PC}$, may only be achieved by conducting a systematic amplitude analysis of many different hadronic final states.
• Detailed studies of the performance of the \gx detector have indicated that identification of particular final states with kaons is possible using the baseline detector configuration.