The Coherent BREMS Project: Baryon Resonance and Exotic Meson Search

Idaho State University, Pocatello ID

Investigators

Abstract

We seek to build upon our earlier work and investigate the nature of resonant baryon states by probing protons with polarized photons. The set of experiments forming the first phase of the g8 run took place in the summer of 2001 (6/04/01 - 8/13/01) in Hall B of Jefferson Lab. These experiments made use of a beam of linearly-polarized photons produced through coherent bremsstrahlung and represent the first time such a probe has been employed at Jefferson Lab. The second phase of g8 will take place in the summer of 2005 (6/20/05 - 8/31/05). The scientific purpose of g8 is to improve the understanding of the underlying symmetry of the quark degrees of freedom in the nucleon, the nature of the parity exchange between the incident photon and the target nucleon, and the mechanism of associated strangeness production in electromagnetic reactions. With the high-quality beam of the tagged and collimated linearly-polarized photons and the nearly complete angular coverage of the Hall-B spectrometer, we seek to extract the differential cross sections and polarization observables for the photoproduction of vector mesons and kaons at photon energies ranging between 1.10 and 2.25 GeV. This proposed research has already yielded two PhD and two Master's theses, as well as one NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. A good part of the funding for this proposal will provide support for one PhD student.