Resolve the chiral-suppression mechanism in glueball decays

Determine whether scalar-glueball decays exhibit strong quark-mass chiral suppression or the substantially milder suppression governed by meson decay constants.

Background

The decay pattern of a scalar glueball is an important discriminator among competing assignments, particularly between $f_0(1500)$ and $f_0(1710)$. One proposed mechanism predicts that the scalar-glueball amplitude for producing a quark pair is proportional to the quark mass, strongly suppressing decays to light quarks and enhancing $K\bar K$ relative to $\pi\pi$. An alternative perturbative treatment argues that the glueball couples to two quark-antiquark pairs and that the relevant suppression is controlled by decay constants, producing a much weaker effect. The paper states that this theoretical disagreement remains unresolved.