Research Page for Curtis A. Meyer

The proton and neutron are the fundamental building blocks of the cores of atoms. However, they themselves are composed of more fundamental constituents, quarks and gluons. These interact via quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and are confined inside their parent proton or neutron. Mesons are bound states of quarks and antiquarks, and in many ways can be though of like a hydrogen atom, where the excited states are themselves new particles.

However, unlike hydrogen, where the levels are pure exictations of the elctron, in mesons it is possible to also excite the gluonic field that binds the quark and the antiquark together. Such an excitation is known as a gluonic excitation, or a hybrid. Interestingly, many of these expected excitations have so-called exotic quantum numbers-a signature that makes them experimentally very interesting.

I am currently the spokeperson of the GlueX experiment at Jefferson Lab in Newport News, Virginia. The experiment will has been built in a new expereimental hall as part of a 340 million dollar upgrade to the laboratory which was completed in 2016. Construction started on GlueX in late 2009. Detector componets were installed in the new hall in 2013 and 2014 and first commissioning happened in late 2014 with a short follow-up in April of 2015. Physics running oficially started in the spring of 2017 and we expect to move to the main phase of our physics program, with detector upgrades and increased beam luminosity, in the fall of 2019.

The GlueX experiment uses a beam of linearly-polarized 9GeV photons incident on a liquid-hydrogen target to produce exotic hybrid mesons. The experiment detects and reconstructs charged particles and photons, which in turn will allow us to resonstruct the particles that were produced in the interaction of the photon with the proton. This allows us to piece back together the exotic particles and shed light on the strong gluonic force binding quarks inside protons and neutrons.