# Detection of Gluons

1. Feb 6, 2009

### ghery

Hi to everyone:

Does anybody of you know when was the gluon detected?, and how do you detect gluons?

Thank you

2. Feb 6, 2009

### vanesch

Staff Emeritus
You detect gluons with a stick-o-meter of course :tongue:

Seriously, I think it is considered that the first "direct" experimental observation of gluons is the 3-jet events discovered in e+e- collisions at PETRA (DESY, Hamburg, Germany) in 1979. There's a not too bad Wiki entry on it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_jet_event

Personally, I find this kind of explanation a bit handwaving of course, but it is the kind of stuff that people tell experimentalist-students when they enter the field. A better explanation is of course that a Monte Carlo simulation based upon QCD containing gluons was statistically in agreement with the data taken there.

After this, there have been several other experimental confirmations of gluons, the most accurate being, I think, deep inelastic e p collisions (again, at DESY but with HERA this time). There are tons of publications by the two collaborations there (H1 and ZEUS).

3. Feb 6, 2009

### humanino

I completely agree with vanesh's answer. I only want to add to his last point that the DIS results can be gazed at here. The amount of data is stupendous. The fact that the points are not located on an horizontal line, called scaling violation, is in perfect agreement with QCD. To fully appreciate the extent of this data set, please take time to realize that we have logarithmic scales in two dimensions $(x_B,Q^2)$.

4. Feb 7, 2009