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Fan Chen

In a historic breakthrough, a Chinese-led international team of scientists has confirmed the existence of the glueball – a rare form of matter made entirely of force.
The finding was announced by a Chinese research team on Thursday at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Natal, Brazil. Held every two years, the event features some of the most significant advancements in the field.
After 15 years of research, the team finally gathered definitive evidence of glueballs using the Beijing Electron Positron Collider II, according to Guangming Daily.
The team includes around 700 scientists from 15 countries.
Glueballs are made of gluons – particles that act as force carriers to “glue” quarks together into larger particles such as protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons make up atoms, the fundamental building blocks of all matter in the universe – from human bodies to everyday objects.
For 50 years, scientists have predicted that gluons could bind together into glueballs because, unlike photons, they attract each other while carrying the strong force. However, evidence supporting the hypothesis remained elusive until the scientists presented it at the conference on Thursday.
The Chinese-led team used the collider to smash electrons and their antiparticles together at near light speed to produce J/psi particles. When these short-lived particles decay, they provide an ideal environment for hunting glueballs.
The team identified a new particle that was likely to be a glueball in 2011, and successfully measured its mass and other properties in 2024 after analysing roughly 10 billion J/psi particles.


They later took a major step forward by identifying a glueball’s defining property: it carries no “flavour” information.
Unlike glueballs, conventional particles such as protons and neutrons contain quarks of different flavours, according to Huang Yanping, co-leader of the team and a research fellow at the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
She told Guangming Daily that the discovery revealed that “force itself has become a physical entity”.
“It’s like in the past we believed messengers only delivered letters, but then one day we suddenly discovered that the messengers themselves could gather together and form a sculpture,” Huang said.
Jin Shan, another leader of the research team and a professor at Nanjing University, said the findings proved an “unprecedented form of matter”.
“It not only enables the theory describing strong interactions to pass its most rigorous test, but also vastly expands the boundaries of our understanding of the physical world,” he said.
Jin added that without the high-performing collider, the discovery of the glueball “might have been delayed by many years”.
The collider, established in 1988, completed a major upgrade in May that tripled its peak luminosity – a key metric that increases the likelihood of producing rare particle events.


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News

China

After 15 years of research, scientists discover definitive evidence of glueballs using the Beijing Electron Positron Collider II


After 15 years of research, scientists discover definitive evidence of glueballs using the Beijing Electron Positron Collider II.


Brazil

Nanjing University

What is a glueball? Chinese-led team finds rare particle made entirely of force

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}After 15 years of research, scientists discover definitive evidence of glueballs using the Beijing Electron Positron Collider II

After 15 years of research, scientists discover definitive evidence of glueballs using the Beijing Electron Positron Collider II