Without being bound to quarks through the strong force, is there any reason why glue balls would be confined? Are they confined
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Yes, gluons are confined, as they couple to themselves, and experience the strong force they underlie/enable/mediate even more strongly than quarks do.
Quarks, if anything, appear to weaken the strong force when they appear as loops in the relevant Feynman graphs (screening: technical gobbledygook... don't worry about it).
In "quenched QCD", a toy theory of the strong interactions which only has quarks as targets/recipients of the strong force, the strong force is even stronger / more confining than that of our real quarkful world. In it, gluons bind themselves into hadrons called glueballs.
In our real word, such glueballs mix/get-absorbed/obscured with conventional hadrons and are subtler to study.
Cosmas Zachos
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