Probing the physics of confinement: the GlueX Project

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Subatomic physics seeks to understand nature - and all its laws - at the most fundamental level, down to its elementary constituents and their interactions. Tremendous strides have been made in the last several decades, using accelerators and astrophysical observations, that have strengthened our conviction that the basic model, known as the Standard Model (SM), is essentially a valid - but not necessarily complete - description of the subatomic world. Its success is based fundamentally on the concept of asymptotic freedom, which stipulates that the quarks, the most elemental particles, behave as "free" particles when their separation distance is small (such as in high energy collisions) so that analytical calculations of their "weakened" interactions can be made. However, when the quarks are bound together to form matter as we know it, their interactions are so strong that they cannot be separated and cannot exist as individual "free" quarks. This is an experimental fact that imposes and additional aspect to the SM, that of "quark confinement". Its exact nature remains one of the outstanding problems in physics.