Researchers may have discovered unseen particle that holds others together For decades, scientists have been searching for 'glueballs' “ a mysterious particle that is vital to the workings of the standard model of physics.A glueball is thought to be made up entirely of gluons, which are the 'sticky' particles that keep nuclear particles together.In other words, they are particles created purely from force.But because they are so unstable, glueballs can only be detected by studying their decay “ and so far, no one has been able to spot this process in action.Now researchers claim they have found a strong nuclear decay pattern, called f0(1710), in the data from a number of particle accelerator experiments that may have been created by a glueball.The discovery was made by Professor Anton Rebhan and Frederic Brünner from the Technical University of Vienna using a new theoretical approach.If their calculations prove to be right, their study could be key to confirming the standard model explanation of the universe.This argues that four forces make up the interactions of particles: gravity, electromagnetic, weak nuclear and strong nuclear.Quarks are small elementary particles that make up such things as neutrons and protons. These quarks are bound together by strong nuclear force.'In particle physics, every force is mediated by a special kind of force particle, and the force particle of the strong nuclear force is the gluon', said Anton Rebhan (TU Wien).Gluons can be seen as more complicated versions of the photon.The massless photons are responsible for the forces of electromagnetism, while eight different kinds of gluons play a similar role for the strong nuclear force.However, there is one important difference: gluons themselves are subject to their own force.This is why there are no bound states of photons, but a particle that consists only of bound gluons, of pure nuclear force, is theoretically possible.Several particles have been found in particle accelerator experiments which are considered to be viable candidates for glueballs.But there has never been a scientific consensus on whether or not one of these signals could in fact be the mysterious particle made of pure force.'Unfortunately, the decay pattern of glueballs cannot be calculated rigorously', says Anton Rebhan.'Simplified model calculations have shown that there are two realistic candidates for glueballs: the mesons called f0(1500) and f0(1710).'A meson is a subatomic particle composed of one quark and one antiquark.'For a long time, the former was considered to be the most promising candidate,' said Rebhan.'The latter has a higher mass, which agrees better with computer simulations, but when it decays, it produces many heavy quarks (the so-called 'strange quarks').'To many particle scientists, this seemed implausible, because gluon interactions do not usually differentiate between heavier and lighter quarks.But the latest study found that it is possible for glueballs to decay predominantly into strange quarks.Surprisingly, the calculated decay pattern into two lighter particles agrees extremely well with the decay pattern measured for f0(1710).Up until now, these alternative glueball decays have not been measured, but within the next few months, two experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (TOTEM and LHCb) and one accelerator experiment in Beijing (BESIII) are expected to yield new data.'These results will be crucial for our theory', says Anton Rebhan. 'For these multi-particle processes, our theory predicts decay rates which are quite different from the predictions of other, simpler models.'If the measurements agree with our calculations, this will be a remarkable success for our approach.'It would be overwhelming evidence for f0(1710) being a glueball.A confirmation of its existence would also once demonstrate that higher dimensional gravity research can be used to solve particle physics problems.According to the researchers, this would provide more support for Einstein's theory of general relativity.