 | This article needs additional citations for verification. (May 2011) |
In particle physics, exotic mesons are mesons that have quantum numbers not possible in the quark model; some proposals for non-standard quark model mesons could be:
- glueballs or gluonium
- Glueballs have no valence quarks at all.
- tetraquarks
- Tetraquarks have two valence quark–antiquark pairs.
- hybrid mesons
- Hybrid mesons contain a valence quark–antiquark pair and one or more gluons.
All exotic mesons are classed as mesons because they are hadrons and carry zero baryon number. Of these, glueballs must be flavor singlets – that is, must have zero isospin, strangeness, charm, bottomness, and topness. Like all particle states, exotic mesons are specified by the quantum numbers which label representations of the Poincaré symmetry, q.e., by the mass (enclosed in parentheses), and by JPC, where J is the angular momentum, P is the intrinsic parity, and C is the charge conjugation parity; One also often specifies the isospin I of the meson. Typically, every quark model meson comes in SU(3) flavor nonet: an octet and an associated flavor singlet. A glueball shows up as an extra (supernumerary) particle outside the nonet.
In spite of such seemingly simple counting, the assignment of any given state as a glueball, tetraquark, or hybrid remains tentative even today, hence the preference for the more generic term exotic meson. Even when there is agreement that one of several states is one of these non-quark model mesons, the degree of mixing, and the precise assignment is fraught with uncertainties. There is also the considerable experimental labor of assigning quantum numbers to each state and crosschecking them in other experiments. As a result, all assignments outside the quark model are tentative. The remainder of this article outlines the situation as it stood at the end of 2004.