Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) has long been established as the underlying
theory of the strong force. While a perturbative treatment of the strong force
is possible at high energies, the picture is much more complicated at lower energy
scales, where the coupling between the quarks and gluons is much stronger,
leading to confinement and an abundance of possible states. An understanding
of how QCD manifests itself at these energies is an interesting problem, and
precise data on the spectrum of states may lead to insights on how to deal with
this highly non-perturbative regime.
The GlueX Experiment at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility
(JLab) aims to study the behavior of quarks and gluons in this confinement
regime by studying the production of particles with a linearly-polarized photon
beam impinging on a proton target. One of the main goals of this experiment is
the search for exotic quantum number states, which directly manifest the gluonic
degrees of freedom. With a high-acceptance detector and a high intensity
beam, we expect unprecedented statistics to search for such states.
Data taking is expected to start in 2014, and construction of the experimental
hall as well as detector components are under way. In this talk, an overview
of the present experimental status of exotic states will be given. I will show a
review the detector components to be used, followed by the the overall status
of the experiment and the analysis framework that we plan to use.
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