Recent Results from the GlueX Experiment

Hybrid mesons are composed of a quark-antiquark pair bound by an excited gluonic field. The study of such states will provide valuable information on contribution of gluonic degrees of freedom in the confinement region of QCD. Although a spectrum of hybrid meson states has been long predicted, there is experimental evidence for only a few hybrids. The GlueX experiment at Jefferson Lab combines a spectrometer with nearly full acceptance for charged and neutral particles and a liquid hydrogen target with a tagged photon beam whose flux and linear polarization peak at 9 GeV. After a commissioning run in 2016, a multi-year data taking campaign began in Spring 2017 with the intent to study the spectrum of light mesons and determine the spectrum of hybrid mesons. First physics results from the existing data will be shown, including beam asymmetries and charmonium production near threshold, and future plans will be discussed.