The CLAS Excited Baryon Program at Jefferson Laboratory

Nucleons are complex systems of confined quarks and exhibit characteristic spectra of excited states. Highly excited nucleon states are sensitive to details of quark confinement which is poorly understood within Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the fundamental theory of strong interactions. Thus, measurements of excited states and the corresponding determination of their properties are needed to come to a better understanding of how confinement works in nucleons. However, the excited states of the nucleon cannot simply be inferred from cleanly separated spectral lines. Quite the contrary, a spectral analysis in nucleon resonance physics is challenging because of the fact that the resonances are broadly overlapping states which decay into a multitude of final states involving mesons and baryons. To provide a consistent and complete picture of an individual nucleon resonance, the various possible production and decay channels must be treated in a multi-channel framework that permits separating resonance from background contributions. Very often, resonances reveal themselves more clearly through interference with dominant amplitudes. These interference terms can be isolated via polarization observables. The current CLAS effort is to utilize highly-polarized hydrogen and deuterium targets as well as polarized photon beams toward a complete measurement of a large number of reaction channels.