Jefferson Labs

The set of experiments forming the g8 run took place in the summer of 2001 (6/04/01 -- 8/13/01) in Hall B of Jefferson Lab. These experiments make 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. Several new and upgraded Hall-B beamline devices were commissioned prior to the production running of g8a. The scientific purpose of g8a 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 will extract the differential cross sections and polarization observables for the photoproduction of vector mesons and kaons at photon energies ranging between 1.8 and 2.2 GeV. We collected over 1.8 billion triggers, which, after our data cuts and analysis, should give us well over 100 times the world's data set. A report on the results of the commissioning of the beamline devices and the progress of the analysis of the g8a run will be presented.

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