Light quark meson spectroscopy: First results from GlueX

The GlueX experiment is located in the recently constructed experimental Hall D at Jefferson Lab (JLab), and provides a unique capability to search for hybrid mesons in high-energy photoproduction, utilizing a 9 GeV linearly polarized photon beam. Commissioning of the Hall D beamline and GlueX detector began in 2014 and was recently completed in the spring of 2016 with the collection of the first dataset utilizing 12 GeV electrons from the upgraded CEBAF at JLab. The statistical precision of this dataset surpasses the previous world data on polarized photoproduction in this energy domain by orders of magnitude. First results from this dataset will be presented along with the plan for acquiring higher statistics datasets to begin the search for hybrid mesons at GlueX.