Mapping the Spectrum of Light Quark Mesons and Gluonic Excitations with Linearly Polarized Photons

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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, which have strengthened our conviction that the basic model, known as the Standard Model, is essentially a valid description of the subatomic world but not necessarily a complete one. 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 ordinary matter their interactions are so strong that they cannot be separated and cannot exist as individual free quarks. This is an experimental fact that imposes an additional aspect to the Standard Model, that of “quark confinement.” Its exact nature remains one of the outstanding problems in physics.