• The GlueX Project

  For the past quarter-century, physicists have suspected that subatomic particles made of the very glue that holds matter together at the most fundamental level must exist. Recently, searches for these elusive particles have intensified as tantalizing hints of their presence have appeared. These include evidence for exotics (mesons with exotic quantum number combinations). The GlueX project at Jefferson Lab aims to identify these unusual particles predicted by QCD, but whose structure lies outside the quark model.

• Studies of Hadronic Structure with Electromagnetic Probes

  It is widely accepted that nucleons and nuclei are built from quarks, and the theory which describes their behavior is QCD, but this understanding is far from perfect and still untested in many ways. Our research program at Jefferson Lab (USA) is based on the search of direct QCD signatures in mesons and nucleons below the region of perturbative QCD (pQCD). For example, pQCD predicts a unique behavior of the pion form factor, as a direct consequence of the asymptotic freedom of quarks at infinite momenta. Our experiments will be the first to test this prediction.

The above research is carried out by members of The SPARRO Group.