Studies of meson spectra via strong decays provide insight regarding QCD at the confinement scale. These studies have led to phenomenological models for QCD such as the constituent quark model. However, QCD allows for a much richer spectrum of meson states which include extra states such as exotics, hybrids, multi-quarks, and glueballs. First discussion of the status of exotic meson searches is given followed by a discussion of plans at Jefferson Lab to double the energy of the machine to 12

more »

... , which will allow us to access photoproduction of mesons in search for gluonic excited states. Exotic and hybrid hesons Paul Eugenio Therefore with pseudoscalar probes, such as pion beams, coupling the quark degrees of freedom to those of an excited flux-tube results in On the other hand, for vector probes, such as the photon viewed as a vector meson, coupling the quark degrees of freedom with that of an excited flux-tube results in It is interesting to note that the vector probe has access to manifestly exotic quantum numbers (exotic J PC = 0 +− , 1 −+ , 2 +− ). Since there exists a wealth of data with pseudoscalar hadronic probes