Gluon fragmentation into glueballs and hybrid mesons

Abstract

The constituent nature of candidate gluonic mesons can be studied by comparing their production in quark and gluon jets. The production rate for such mesons depends on the colour confinement processes at the end of the perturbative evolution. Whereas we expect enhanced production of hybrids in the fragmentation region of a gluon jet, the rate for glueballs depends on the relative importance of colour triplet and colour octet neutralization. These neutralization processes can be studied independently in events with large rapidity gaps. If octet processes turn out important the recently suggested lightest J PC =0 ++ glueball with mass around 1000 MeV should become visible already in the spectrum of the leading charged particle pairs.