Exclusive neutral pion production and Compton scattering at GlueX

By using data collected from Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator (JLab), I will be observing two specific reactions from the collision of linearly polarized photons with protons in a liquid hydrogen target. In this work, studies of the neutral pion reaction will be presented along with an exploratory study of the Compton scattering process. These reactions were studied by utilizing the fine-grained calorimetry of the GlueX experiment in order to aid in the understanding of meson production mechanisms in high-energy photoproduction. The separation of neutral pions and Compton events is challenging due to potential merging of the neutral pion decay photons into a single shower for large polar angles and high momentum. This merging causes neutral pion decay photons with a small opening angle to look like single Compton photon showers. As a result, electromagnetic shower shape variables are used to study these effects, and with the introduction of three new width variables, comparisons between data and Monte Carlo samples are obtained to estimate the signal purity for these two reactions. These results will provide a stepping stone to ultimately measure the sigma beam asymmetry for large angle Compton scattering events