  One of the unanswered and most fundamental questions in physics regards the
nature of the confinement mechanism of quarks and gluons in quantum
chromodynamics (QCD). Exotic hybrid mesons manifest gluonic degrees of freedom
and their detailed spectroscopy will provide the precision data necessary to
test assumptions in lattice QCD and the specific phenomenology leading to
confinement. Photoproduction is expected to be a particularly effective manner
to produce exotic hybrids, however, existing data using photon beams are
sparse. At Jefferson Laboratory, plans are underway by the GlueX Collaboration
to use the coherent bremsstrahlung technique to produce a linearly polarized
photon beam. A solenoid-based hermetic detector will be used to collect data on
meson production and decays with statistics that will exceed existing
photoproduction data by several orders of magnitude after the first year of
running. In order to reach the ideal photon energy of 9 GeV required for these
studies, the energy of the Jefferson Laboratory electron accelerator, CEBAF,
will be doubled from its current maximum energy of 6 GeV to 12 GeV. The physics
motivating the search and the status of the project are reviewed.
