[Clas_hadron] Meson-eX abstract for DNP

[Raffaella De Vita]

Dear Hadron Spectroscopists,
You can find below an abstract on the meson-eX program that we would like to submit to DNP.
Comments and suggestions would be very much appreciated.
Best regards,
	Raffaella, Derek, Ken and Marco


MesonEx: meson spectroscopy with quasi-real photons in CLAS12
A broad program to study meson spectroscopy in the light quark sector with the CLAS12 experiment in Hall B at Jefferson Laboratory has been proposed with the goal of searching for exotic mesons and studying poorly known and rare states, such as scalars and strange mesons. For this purpose, the experiment uses quasi-real photons produced by 10.6 GeV electrons scattering off a proton target and detected at small angles (2.5-4.5 deg) in the CLAS12 Forward Tagger. In these kinematics the virtual photon that is produced has very low four-momentum transfer, Q2, and can be considered as quasi-real. This photon has a significant degree of linear polarization that can be determined event-by-event from the electron scattering kinematics and exploited in the study of the hadronic final states via Partial Wave Analyses (PWA) to extract the contribution of individual resonances.
After completing the commissioning in February 2018, the experiment started the production phase, completing an extensive period of data taking between 2018 and 2019, collecting about 300 mC of charge corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 0.4 pb-1. In this talk first results from a selection of final states will be presented.