Meson f0(1710) could be so-called “glueball” particle made purely of nuclear force

Terms to describe the strange world of quantum physics have come to be quite common in our lexicon. Who, for instance, hasn’t at least heard of a quark, or a gluon or even Schrodinger’s cat? Now there’s a new name to remember: “Glueball.”

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CrazyNeutrino said:

Meson f0(1710) could be so-called “glueball” particle made purely of nuclear force

Terms to describe the strange world of quantum physics have come to be quite common in our lexicon. Who, for instance, hasn’t at least heard of a quark, or a gluon or even Schrodinger’s cat? Now there’s a new name to remember: “Glueball.”

more..

clap clap clap clap clap clap clap.

I can’t remember the first time I heard of the glueball. It slowly impinged on my consciousness perhaps in the mid 1990s. A glueball is, as all should know, a ball composed solely of gluons. Gluons being the carrier of the strong nuclear force. It hadn’t occurred to me that we could ever see it as a particle with a definite mass, because it’s a composite particle composed of an indefinite number of simple particles, it could have a large number of different masses (like atomic nuclei), depending on how many gluons it contains, and how tightly they’re bound together.

According to wikipedia, there are other candidates proposed for the glueball:

X(3020) observed by the BaBar collaboration is a candidate for an excited state of the 2-+, 1+- or 1— glueball states with a mass of about 3.02 GeV.
f0(500) also known as σ — the properties of this particle are possibly consistent with a 1000 MeV or 1500 MeV mass glueball.
f0(980) — the structure of this composite particle is consistent with the existence of a light glueball.
f0(1370) — existence of this resonance is disputed but is a candidate for a glueball-meson mixing state
f0(1500) — existence of this resonance is undisputed but its status as a glueball-meson mixing state or pure glueball is not well established.
f0(1710) — existence of this resonance is undisputed but its status as a glueball-meson mixing state or pure glueball is not well established.

Gluon jets at the LEP experiment show a 40% excess over theoretical expectations of electromagnetically neutral clusters which suggests that electromagnetically neutral particles expected in gluon rich environments such as glueballs are likely to be present.

Many of these candidates have been the subject of active investigation for at least eighteen years. The GlueX experiment, scheduled to begin in 2014, has been specifically designed to produce more definitive experimental evidence glueballs.