Recent Progress in Measurement of the Charged and Neutral Pion Polarizabilities at Jefferson Lab

The electromagnetic polarizability is a fundamental property of hadrons, which depends on the binding of their constituent components. Measuring the polarizability of pions, the lightest hadrons, provides a stringent test of QCD predictions. The recent "Charged Pion Polarizability" (CPP) and "Neutral Pion Polarizability" (NPP) experiments at Jefferson Lab, utilizing the GlueX spectrometer, aimed to extract pion polarizabilities through precise measurements of the Primakoff photoproduction of pion pairs on a heavy nucleus. This approach marks the first measurement of the neutral pion polarizability.

A lead target and muon chambers were incorporated to the GlueX setup for the CPP/NPP runs, alongside newly developed AI algorithms for effective background rejection of leptonic pair production. Additionally, data were collected at low intensity, and a new trigger was integrated into the DAQ to improve experimental systematics. Significant progress has been made in analyzing the collected data, which will be the focus of this presentation.