The Hall D Physics Program at JLab

Abstract

GlueX is one of the flagship experiments of the 12 GeV era at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab). The energy of the electron accelerator at JLab is presently undergoing an upgrade from 6 GeV to 12 GeV and a 4th experimental hall (Hall D) is being added. The GlueX experimental apparatus consists of a tagged coherent bremsstrahlung photon beam incident on a liquid hydrogen target. The photoproduced mesons, which are created inside of a 2.2 T solenoid, will then pass through a pair of drift chambers and eventually deposit their energy into either of two calorimeters, depending on their respective angles. GlueX will attempt to map out the light meson spectrum and search for meson-gluon hybrids to better understand the confinement of quarks and gluons in quantum chromodynamics (QCD). There is little data on the photoproduction of light mesons and the GlueX experiment will exceed the current photoproduction data by several orders of magnitude in the first year alone. Photoproduction is specifically well suited to search for meson-gluon hybrids because in the flux tube model the production cross-sections are higher for meson-gluon hybrids from photons, with the spins of the virtual quark-antiquark pair aligned, than from other sources such as pions, with the spins of the quark-antiquark pair anti-aligned. There are also other Hall D experiments proposed to look for physics beyond the Standard Model by studying Eta rare or forbidden decay channels such as eta to two neutral pions. The 12 GeV upgrade of the JLab accelerator and the complete physics program of Hall D will be presented.