Search for a Singly Strange Hexaquark Using Polarization Data From CLAS12 at Jefferson Lab Virginia

Recently hadron spectroscopy has seen a lot of success. There has been a large number of baryon and meson resonances discovered over the last two decades. There have also been several tetra and pentaquark candidates with experimental evidence but not confirmed. The first serious candidate was the X(3872), a potential tetraquark, leading to this rise in success for exotic hadron physics. This has brought about improvements in Quantum Chromo Dynamics (QCD), our current best description of interactions between quarks and gluons. QCD predicts the existence of hexaquark states, and then the d∗(2380) was discovered. This thesis explores the rest of the d∗ Jp = 3+ anti-decuplet by searching for experimental evidence of the ds hexaquark. This is the first analysis of the e′d → e′K+ds → e′K+Λn channel using the Py′ measurements of the Λ as a lens to perform this search. This observable was extracted from Λ electroproduction events off a liquid deuterium target. From this an upper limit of the Breit-Wigner peak strength was extracted. This was done with the use of the CLAS12 detector system housed at Thomas Jefferson Laboratory in Virginia, USA. These polarization measurements are the first to be made on this data, and this is the first time the ds has been searched for in such a way.