A new proposal for glueball exploration in hard gluon fragmentation

TL;DR

This paper proposes an experimental method to identify glueballs by searching for peaks in the invariant mass of leading K_S-pairs from energetic gluon jets in Z boson decays, aiming to test QCD predictions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental approach and a model for gluon-glueball fragmentation, suggesting a feasible way to detect glueballs in high-energy collider experiments.

Findings

Substantial predicted fragmentation rate into glueballs.

Potential for successful detection at LEP experiments.

A physically motivated model for gluon-glueball fragmentation.

Abstract

An unambiguous identification of glueballs in experiments will be of great significance, because their existence is an important test of QCD. The proposal, advanced here, is to experimentally search for glueballs as peaks in the invariant mass of a leading K_S-pair fragmenting from an energetic gluon jet out of high-statistics three-jet events in hadronic decays of the weak neutral Z boson. Using a physically motivated model of the gluon-glueball fragmentation function, we find a substantial fragmentation rate into a leading glueball. It is very likely that a search, along the lines suggested here by any of the four groups at the Large Electron Positron collider at CERN, will prove fruitful.