last updated June 6, 2010
The GlueX Collaboration is building a 12 GeV photon beam line and a dedicated spectrometer to study fundamental issues in strong QCD at Jefferson Laboratory. Our primary aim is to identify gluonic resonances in meson photoproduction by detecting their decays into exclusive final states in a hermetic detector with high acceptance and good resolution for both charged and neutral particles. Unambiguous discovery of a multiplet of hybrid mesons will provide answers to long-standing questions regarding how gluonic degrees of freedom are expressed in hadrons. The experiment has sensitivity over a sufficient mass range that the failure to observe any such resonances in the GlueX data would demand the re-examination of a fairly broad set of theoretical ideas and methods that are currently used to compute hadronic properties based on QCD. Other related issues in hadronic physics that fall within the scope of GlueX include chiral symmetry-breaking in the pseudo-scalar nonet through Primakov production of η and η' mesons, rare neutral meson decays, spectroscopy of doubly-strange baryons, quark hadronization in nuclear matter, and nucleon structure through inverse-DVCS.