Searching for Exotic Hadrons at GlueX: From light quarks to charm

The search for hybrid mesons and the detailed study of their spectrum is the primary goal of the GlueX Experiment in Hall D at Jefferson Lab, which promises to provide unique insight into gluonic degrees of freedom in QCD and the nature of confinement.  The experiment combines an intense photon beam with linear polarization peaking around 9 GeV incident on a liquid hydrogen target with a nearly hermetic spectrometer, allowing for the comprehensive study of charged and neutral particle final states.  GlueX began physics running in early 2017, and has currently finished the first stage of data collection, in which orders of magnitude more data have been collected than earlier experiments at this energy. 

This talk will report on the status of the analysis of this photoproduction data, including the measurement of polarization observables to study the nature of production processes, prospects for spectroscopy and amplitude analysis for the study of the light meson spectrum and hybrid meson searches, and other measurements enabled by the GlueX data, such as the photoproduction of J/psi near threshold which allows for the search for production of charmed pentaquarks.