New evidence supports existence of glueballs, BES III experiment finds
Physicists at the BES III experiment have found new evidence for glueballs, particles made entirely of gluons, according to Ars Technica.
The results were posted to arXiv last month and presented last week at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP).
Everything around us is made of quarks held together by gluons, the carriers of the strong nuclear force, to form protons and neutrons that comprise the core of every atom. The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 was widely seen as completing the Standard Model of particle physics, but many questions remain, including whether glueballs really exist. According to the Standard Model, they should; they are a direct prediction of quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the strong nuclear force.
If the Standard Model is correct, there should even be several kinds of glueballs.