BESIII physicists find evidence of glueball particle X(2370)

Physicists participating in the Beijing Spectrometer III (BESIII) collaboration have presented evidence suggesting that the X(2370) particle is a glueball, a composite particle made entirely of gluons. This finding was presented at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) in Natal, Brazil.

Glueballs are predicted by quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the strong nuclear force. While gluons typically act as the carriers that bind quarks together to form protons and neutrons, theory suggests they can also interact with one another to form distinct particles.

To investigate the nature of X(2370), the research team analyzed data from approximately ten billion decays of the J/ψ particle. The results, which appeared in a preprint on arXiv, indicate that the particle's mass and spin parity (0−+) align with specific predictions for a glueball. The particle was originally identified in 2011 by Yanhping Huang of the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP).