Gluon-Glueball Duality and Glueball Searches

TL;DR

This paper introduces the concept of gluon-glueball duality, analogous to quark-hadron duality, and explores its potential application in experimental glueball searches through heavy quarkonium radiative decay.

Contribution

It proposes a new duality concept in QCD and discusses its approximate validity in real QCD, offering a novel approach for glueball detection.

Findings

Duality is demonstrated in simplified QCD models.

An approximate duality may hold in real QCD based on time scale hierarchies.

A new method for experimental glueball searches is suggested.

Abstract

We discuss a notion of gluon-glueball duality analogous to quark-hadron duality. We apply this idea to the radiative decay of heavy orthoquarkonium, $Q\bar Q \to \gamma g g$, which has been used to search for glueballs. The duality is first introduced in two simplified contexts: (i) a hypothetical version of QCD without any light quarks and (ii) QCD in the large-$N_c$ limit. We then discuss how an approximate form of this duality could hold in real QCD, based on a hierarchy of time scales in the temporal evolution of the $gg$ subsystem in radiative orthoquarkonium decay. We apply this notion of gluon-glueball duality to suggest a method that could be useful in experimental searches for glueballs.