Possible evidence of glueballs found during Beijing Spectrometer III experiments

A large international team of physicists working on the BES III collaboration has announced possible physical evidence of glueballs. In their study, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group analyzed decaying particles in a particle collider and uncovered what they believe to be evidence of glueballs.

Glueballs are theoretical interactions that can occur between gluons, which are carriers of the strong nuclear force. Up until this latest research, it was not known if such theories were correct.

Gluons are subatomic particles that are believed to hold quarks together. Quarks are also subatomic particles; they form the nuclei of protons. Mesons are also made from quarks, or more specifically, one quark and one antiquark. Because gluons carry the strong nuclear force, they are able to interact with quarks and other gluons. Due to this latter characteristic, researchers have suggested that gluons could form a kind of particle without involving quarks. The result would be a glueball.

For this new study, the research team was looking for evidence of glueballs. To do so, they forced mesons to collide at high speeds at the Beijing Electron-Positron Collider, located at the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing, China. They then studied the resulting debris field.

More specifically, they looked for and measured rare combinations of proton/antiprotons in the debris field—prior work using the same collider had found evidence of these.

The researchers were able to analyze 10 billion samples generated over the past decade, and they found evidence of particles with an average mass of 2,395 MeV/c², which matches what theory has suggested for glueballs.

For now, they have named the particle X(2370) based on the mass of the original particles observed.

The research team acknowledges that their findings are not absolute proof of the existence of glueballs—other interactions, they note, could have led to similar findings. Thus, more work is required before a consensus can be reached.

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