Impressions of the Meson Spectrum: Hybrids & Exotics, present and future

Abstract

It has long been expected that the spectrum of hadrons in QCD would be far richer and extensive than experiment has so far revealed. While there have been experimental hints of this richness for some time, it is really only in the last few years that dramatic progress has been seen in the exploration both experimentally and in calculations on the lattice. Precision studies enabled by new technology both with detectors and high performance computations are converging on an understanding of the spectrum in strong coupling QCD. These methodologies are laying the foundation for a decade of potential discovery that electro and photoproduction experiments at Jefferson Lab, which when combined with key results on $B$ and charmonium decays from both $e^+e^-$ and $pp$ colliders, should turn mere impressions of the light meson spectrum into a high definition picture.