A Search for the LHCb Pentaquark in Hall C at Jefferson Lab

The Jefferson Lab experiment E12-16-007 will measure the elastic J/ψ photo-production cross section as a function of proton momentum transfer variable t and photon energy E_γ in the region of the recently discovered LHCb charmed pentaquark P_c(4380) and P_c(4450) resonances. The experiment will be performed using a bremsstrahlung beam generated by a 10.6 GeV incident electron beam traversing a copper radiator upstream of a hydrogen target in Hall C. The two high momentum spectrometers of Hall C, HMS and SHMS will detect the e⁺e^- di-lepton J/ψ decay pair in coincidence. In combination with the high incident photon flux, the optimized spectrometer settings provide the preferred kinematics where the s-channel pentaquark signal, if it exists, should strongly dominate over that of the regular t-channel J/ψ production. I will discuss the very preliminary results that will either confirm or refute the resonance nature of the LHCb pentaquark Pc(4450).