glueball
Sign in to saveIn particle physics, a glueball (also gluonium, gluon-ball) is a hypothetical composite particle. It consists solely of gluons, without valence quarks. Such a state is possible because gluons carry color charge and experience the strong interaction between themselves. Glueballs are extremely difficult to identify in particle accelerators, because they mix with ordinary meson states. In pure gauge theory, glueballs are the only states of the spectrum and some of them are stable.
Article
14 sectionsContents
- Properties
- Constituent particles and color charge
- Total angular momentum
- Electric charge
- Mass and parity
- Stability and decay channels
- Practical impact on macroscopic low energy physics
- Lattice QCD simulations
- Experimental candidates
- Glueball candidates
- Scalar glueball candidates
- Other candidates
- See also
- References
In particle physics, a glueball (also gluonium, gluon-ball) is a hypothetical composite particle. It consists solely of gluons, without valence quarks. Such a state is possible because gluons carry color charge and experience the strong interaction between themselves. Glueballs are extremely difficult to identify in particle accelerators, because they mix with ordinary meson states. In pure gauge theory, glueballs are the only states of the spectrum and some of them are stable.
Theoretical calculations show that glueballs should exist at energy ranges accessible with current collider technology. However, due to the aforementioned difficulty (among others), they have so far not been observed and identified with certainty, although phenomenological calculations have suggested that an experimentally identified glueball candidate, denoted f(1710), has properties consistent with those expected of a Standard Model glueball.