Who, for instance, hasn't at least heard of a quark, or a gluon or even Schrodinger's cat? Now there's a new name to remember: "Glueball." A long sought-after exotic particle, and recently claimed to have been detected by researchers at TU Wien, the glueball's strangest characteristic is that it is composed entirely of gluons. In other words, it is a particle created from pure force.

First mooted as a particle in 1972 when physicists Murray Gell-Mann and Harald Fritsch wondered about possible bound states of recently-discovered gluons, scientists have sought the particle in the intervening decades. Originally dubbed "gluonium," but now called glueballs, these strange particles of pure force are exceptionally unstable and can only be indirectly detected by monitoring their decay as they disassemble into lesser particles.

More recently, physics Professor Anton Rebhan and his PhD student Frederic Brünner from TU Wien have theorized that a strong nuclear decay resonance, called f0(1710), observed in the data from a number of particle accelerator experiments is strong evidence for the elusive glueball particle.