The Physics of Glueballs

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent theoretical and phenomenological studies on glueballs, particles composed of gluons, exploring their properties and potential detection in experiments and quark-gluon plasma using various models.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of multiple theoretical approaches to understanding glueballs, highlighting recent results and their implications for experimental searches.

Findings

Glueballs are challenging to detect experimentally.

Lattice QCD and other models predict glueball properties.

Potential signals of glueballs in quark-gluon plasma.

Abstract

Glueballs are particles whose valence degrees of freedom are gluons and therefore in their description the gauge field plays a dominant role. We review recent results in the physics of glueballs with the aim set on phenomenology and discuss the possibility of finding them in conventional hadronic experiments and in the Quark Gluon Plasma. In order to describe their properties we resort to a variety of theoretical treatments which include, lattice QCD, constituent models, AdS/QCD methods, and QCD sum rules. The review is supposed to be an informed guide to the literature. Therefore, we do not discuss in detail technical developments but refer the reader to the appropriate references.