Simulating Glueball Production in $N_f = 0$ QCD

Abstract

In an $SU(N_c)$ gauge theory with zero light quark flavours $N_f = 0$, the only hadronic states that form below the confinement scale are composite gluon states called glueballs. These minimal confining sectors arise in many Hidden Valley extensions of the Standard Model, including scenarios that could hold the solution to the dark matter question and the hierarchy problem. Quantitative study of dark glueball phenomenology requires an understanding of pure glue hadronization, which to date is severely lacking. In this work we show that significant progress can be made by combining a perturbative pure glue parton shower with a self-consistent and physically motivated parameterization of the unknown non-perturbative physics, thanks to the modest hierarchy between the glueball mass and the confinement scale. We make our simulation code available as the public GlueShower package, the first glueball generator for Hidden Valley theories, and perform preliminary studies of several glueball production observables, with theoretical uncertainties that take the full range of possible hadronization scenarios into account. We hope this will enable new studies of dark sector phenomenology that were previously inaccessible.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures. Minor edits in v2, corrected typos and missing references. Added explanation for non-perturbative calculation in Section IV.B.