Vector meson and associated strangeness production using a linearly polarized photon beam at Jefferson Lab

The set of experiments forming the g8a run took place in the summer of 2001 in Hall B of Jefferson Lab. The g8a run was the commissioning experiment for the linearly-polarized photon beam at CLAS. The aim of these experiments is to improve the understanding of the underlying symmetry of the quark degrees of freedom in the nucleon, the nature of the parity exchange between the incident photon and the target nucleon, and the mechanism of associated strangeness production in electromagnetic reactions. A beam of tagged and collimated linearly polarized photons (energy range 1.8-2.2 GeV) in conjunction with the large solid angle coverage of CLAS make possible the extraction of the differential cross-sections and polarization observables for the photoproduction of vector mesons and kaons. The reaction channels are under investigation to search for possibly missing nucleon resonances. An overview of the experiment and preliminary results on the measurement of the photon asymmetries of the aforementioned reactions will be presented in this paper