Gluonic Excitations and the GlueX experiment at Jefferson Lab

Recent lattice QCD calculations predict a rich spectrum of hybrid mesons, that are formed by exciting the gluonic field that couples the quarks. A subset of these hybrid mesons are predicted to have exotic quantum numbers which cannot be formed from a simple quark-antiquark pair, and thus provide an ideal laboratory for testing QCD in the confinement regime. The GlueX experiment in Jefferson Lab's Hall D will study the pattern of gluonic excitations in the meson spectrum through photoproduction reactions with a liquid hydrogen target. In this talk the status of the GlueX experiment will be presented, including results from the first commissioning beam and prospects for studying some reactions of interest in hybrid meson searches. Finally, we will present some highlights from the other proposed Hall D experimental programs.