Researchers associated with the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility have taken the first experimental result toward solving the problem of quark confinement. Their research aims to study hybrid mesons, which resembles to ordinary mesons in composition, but these unstable subatomic particles are said to exhibit drastically different behavior.

The first experimental result of the researchers has been published from the newly upgraded CEBAF at the Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. The result clearly shows the feasibility of finding out a potential new form of matter to have a detailed investigation on why quarks are never detected in isolation.

The professor of physics at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and spokesperson for the Gluonic Excitations Experiment (GlueX) at Jefferson Lab, Curtis Meyer, made it known that a meson is a quark and antiquark bound together, and people's understanding is that the glue holds it together. While a hybrid meson is a strong gluonic field being excited, Jefferson Lab reported.

Meyer claims that generating hybrid mesons will help nuclear physicists to have a detailed analysis on particles in which the strong gluonic field will contribute directly to their properties. The hybrid mesons could provide an opening into how subatomic particles are created by the strong force and quark confinement, Phys.Org reported.

Meyer hopes that they can demonstrate the excited gluonic field as an essential constituent of matter. That is something that has not been studied in anything that they have seen so far. Thus, it could be a new type of hadronic matter that has not been perceived.

Furthermore, Meyer said that he is sure that they have produced hybrid mesons already, they just don't have enough data to start searching for mesons. Meyer also said that there are several steps that they are going through in terms of understanding their analysis and the detector.

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