The GlueX experiment at Jefferson Lab studies photoproduction of mesons using linearly polarized $8.5\,\text{GeV}$ photons impinging on a hydrogen target which is contained within a detector with near-complete coverage for charged and neutral particles. We present measurements of spin-density matrix elements for the photoproduction of the vector meson $\rho$(770). The statistical precision achieved exceeds that of previous experiments for polarized photoproduction in this energy range by orders of magnitude. We confirm a high degree of $s$-channel helicity conservation at small squared four-momentum transfer $t$ and are able to extract the $t$-dependence of natural and unnatural-parity exchange contributions to the production process in detail. We confirm the dominance of natural-parity exchange over the full $t$ range. We also find that helicity amplitudes in which the helicity of the incident photon and the photoproduced $\rho(770)$ differ by two units are negligible for $-t<0.5\,\text{GeV}^{2}/c^{2}$.
We report a measurement of the $\pi^-$ photoproduction beam asymmetry for the reaction $\vec{\gamma} p \rightarrow \pi^- \Delta^{++}$ using data from the GlueX experiment in the photon beam energy range 8.2--8.8 GeV. The asymmetry $\Sigma$ is measured as a function of four-momentum transfer $t$ to the $\Delta^{++}$ and compared to phenomenological models. We find that $\Sigma$ varies as a function of $t$: negative at smaller values and positive at higher values of $|t|$. The reaction can be described theoretically by $t$-channel particle exchange requiring pseudoscalar, vector, and tensor intermediaries. In particular, this reaction requires charge exchange, allowing us to probe pion exchange and the significance of higher-order corrections to one-pion exchange at low momentum transfer. Constraining production mechanisms of conventional mesons may aid in the search for and study of unconventional mesons. This is the first measurement of the process at this energy.
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