On Two-Body Decays of A Scalar Glueball

Abstract

We study two body decays of a scalar glueball. We show that in QCD a spin-0 pure glueball (a state only with gluons) cannot decay into a pair of light quarks if chiral symmetry holds exactly, i.e., the decay amplitude is chirally suppressed. However, this chiral suppression does not materialize itself at the hadron level such as in decays into $π^+π^-$ and $K^+K^-$, because in perturbative QCD the glueball couples to two (but not one) light quark pairs that hadronize to two mesons. Using QCD factorization based on an effective Lagrangian, we show that the difference of hadronization into $ππ$ and $KK$ already leads to a large difference between ${\rm Br} (π^+π^-)$ and ${\rm Br}(K^+K^-)$, even the decay amplitude is not chirally suppressed. Moreover, the small ratio of $R={\rm Br}(ππ)/{\rm Br}(K\bar K)$ of $f_0(1710)$ measured in experiment does not imply $f_0(1710)$ to be a pure glueball. With our results it is helpful to understand the partonic contents if ${\rm Br}(ππ)$ or ${\rm Br}(K\bar K)$ is measured reliably.