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A new Large-Acceptance Forward Angle Spectrometer (Super BigBite) is under development at JLab/Hall A for the upcoming experiments in Hall A at Jefferson Lab where a longitudinally polarized electron beam of 11 GeV is now available. This beam, combined with innovative polarized targets will provided luminosity up to 1039/(s·cm2) opening exciting opportunities to investigate unexplored aspects of the inner structure of the nucleon. The tracker of this new apparatus is based on the Gas Electron Multiplier (GEM) technology, which has been chosen to optimize cost/performance, position resolution and to meet the high hit rate (>1 MHz/cm2). The first GEM detector modules, designed and built by the INFN Collaboration JLAB12, were tested at the DESY test beam facility in Hamburg, by using an electron beam with energy ranging from 2.0 to 6.0 GeV. In particular, three 40x50 cm2 GEM chambers were equipped with a new implementation of the APV25 readout chip. Measurements were performed at different impact points and angles between the electron beam and the plane of the GEM chambers, with one large chamber in a solenoid magnetic field up to 500 Gauss. In this paper we present the technical features of the tracker and comment on the presently achieved performance.

The only recent η′ photoproduction data off proton available in literature are the differential and total cross sections published by the CLAS and CB-ELSA-TAPS Collaborations. However, the wide information about reaction cross sections are not sufficient to understand the role of resonances involved in the process. Different theoretical works stressed the importance to measure also polarization observables in order to solve the ambiguities in the choice of the parameters used in their models. We present the analysis of η′ photoproduction off the proton analysis, identifying the investigated meson by the π+π−η, π0π0η, and γγ decay modes by using the GRAAL apparatus; and we show the preliminary GRAAL results on the beam asymmetry Σ at beam energy of 1475 MeV.

A new Large-Acceptance Forward Angle Spectrometer (Super BigBite) is under development at JLab/Hall A to optimally exploit the exciting opportunities offered by the 12 GeV upgrade of the electron beam. The tracker of this new apparatus is based on the Gas Electron Multiplier (GEM) technology, which has been chosen to optimize cost/performance, position resolution and to meet the high hit rate (>1 MHz/cm2). The first GEM detector modules, designed and built by the INFN Collaboration JLAB12, were tested at the DESY test beam facility in Hamburg, by using an electron beam with energy ranging from 2.0 to 6.0 GeV. In particular, two 40x50 cm2 and one 10x10 cm2 GEM chambers were equipped with a new implementation of the APV25 readout chip. Measurements were performed at different impact points and angles between the electron beam and the plane of the GEM chambers, with one large chamber in a solenoid magnetic field up to 500 Gauss. In this report we present the technical characteristics of the detector and comment on the presently achieved performance.

Differential and total cross section measurements on η′ photoproduction were published by the CLAS Collaboration (M. Dugger et al., Phys.Rev.Lett.96, 062001 (2006) and M. Williams et al., Phys.Rev.C80, 045213 (2009)) for center-of-mass energies from near the threshold up to 2.84 GeV, and by the CB-ELSA-TAPS Collaboration (V. Crede et al., Phys.Rev.C80, 055202 (2009)) up to 2.36 GeV and also making a precise threshold scan of the differential cross section in the 1446 – 1527.4 MeV γ beam energy range. However, the wide information about reaction cross sections are not sufficient to understand the role of resonances involved in the process. Different theoretical works stressed the importance to have also polarization observables in order to solve the ambiguity in the choice of the parameters used in their models. We present the analysis of the η′ photoproduction off the proton, identifying the meson via the γγ, π0π0η, and π+π−η decay modes by using the GRAAL apparatus; and we show the preliminary GRAAL results on the beam asymmetry Σ from the threshold (1.446 GeV) up to 1.5 GeV.