Photoproduction of Mesons Decaying into K_SK_S at GlueX

The K_SK_S channel at GlueX allows for a high-precision study of light unflavored mesons for beam energies between 6.25 and 12 GeV. It provides a convenient filter for intermediate states with J^PC = even⁺⁺ , particularly the isospin-0 f-mesons, which are supernumerary in the quark model and may mix with the scalar glueball or contain other exotic states such as light tetraquarks or molecular mesons. We present a study of the exclusive reaction γp → K_SK_Sp → 2π⁺2π^-p with polarized photons in the GlueX detector to extract the photocouplings of the light scalar and tensor mesons. Using the sPlot method on the rest frame lifetime of both kaons, we are able to efficiently remove non-strange backgrounds in the channel. We perform a model-independent partial-wave analysis to separate S- and D-wave contributions produced in both natural and unnatural parity exchange processes. We also fit a K-matrix amplitude to the data to isolate the contributions from individual mesons.