Evidence of glueballs that May have Been Discovered During Beijing Spectrometer III Tests
The BES III collaboration, which involves a sizable multinational team of physicists, has revealed potential physical proof of glueballs. They believe they have found evidence of glueballs through their analysis of decaying particles in a particle collider, which was reported in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Theoretically, interactions between gluons—strong nuclear force carriers—can result in glueballs. It was unknown whether or not these theories were accurate prior to this most recent study.
It is thought that subatomic particles called gluons hold quarks together. Moreover, quarks are subatomic particles; they make up protons’ nuclei. Quarks, or more precisely, one quark and one antiquark, are also the building blocks of mesons. Gluons can interact with quarks and other gluons because they bear the strong nuclear force. Because of this latter property, scientists have proposed that gluons could create a particle type independent of quarks. A glueball would be the end product.
The goal of this new investigation was to find glueball proof. At the Beijing Electron-Positron Collider, housed at the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing, China, they did this by forcing mesons to collide at extremely high speeds. The resultant debris field was then examined by them.
More precisely, they searched for and measured uncommon proton/antiproton pairings in the debris field; evidence for these had been identified by earlier studies using the same collider.
After analyzing 10 billion samples produced in the last ten years, the researchers discovered evidence of particles with an average mass of 2,395 MeV/c2, which is consistent with glueball theory.
Based on the mass of the first particles seen, they have currently given the particle the designation X(2370).
The research team notes that other interactions may have produced results similar to theirs, therefore their findings do not constitute definitive evidence for the existence of glueballs. Therefore, more work needs to be done before an agreement can be made.
