The GlueX Experiment: Recent Results and Future Plans

The GlueX experiment, located in experimental Hall D of Jefferson Lab, seeks to map the spectrum of light mesons in search of exotic hybrid mesons, a predicted class of hadronic states with explicit gluonic degrees of freedom. GlueX is a photoproduction experiment utilizing a linearly polarized photon beam at $E_\gamma=$ 8-9 GeV and a large acceptance spectrometer. The experiment has already collected orders of magnitude more data than previous experiments at similar energies. We show results on asymmetry measurements in the production of pseudoscalars mesons, which refine our understanding of production mechanisms in photoproduction at our energies. We also present results on $J/\psi$ photoproduction, which provides model constraints on heavy quark photoproduction and the ability to search for s-channel production of pentaquark candidate $P_c^+$ states.