Search for higher mass resonances via KK decay channel in pp collisions with ALICE at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper reports on the search for high-mass resonances, including potential glueball candidates, in proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV using ALICE detector data, focusing on invariant mass distributions of kaon pairs.

Contribution

It presents the first measurements of high-mass resonance invariant mass distributions in pp collisions at 13 TeV, exploring potential glueball states.

Findings

Observation of invariant mass distributions for K0sK0s and K+K- pairs.

Identification of potential resonance structures in the high-mass region.

Data provides new constraints on glueball candidates.

Abstract

The quark model has proven successful in describing the basic building blocks of strongly interacting particles in the Standard Model, where hadronic states consist of quarks and gluons. At the same time, Lattice QCD predicts the possibility of glueball candidates in the mass range \mbox{1550--1750} MeV/$c^2$, which have never been observed. The experimental search for the existence of mesons with no quark content is both interesting and challenging as the glueball is very likely to mix with surrounding quark-antiquark scalar meson states with the same quantum numbers. The large statistics data sample collected by ALICE in pp collisions at the highest LHC center-of-mass energy provides an opportunity to measure high mass resonances, whose characteristics and internal structure are still unknown. In this article, we report on the measurements of invariant mass distributions of higher mass resonances using the decay channels of K$^{0}_\mathrm{S}\mathrm{K}^{0}_\mathrm{S}$ and K$^{+}$K$^{-}$ pairs in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV using ALICE detector at midrapidity.