High spin glueballs from the lattice Original Research Article

We discuss the principles underlying higher spin glueball calculations on the lattice. For that purpose, we develop numerical techniques to rotate Wilson loops by arbitrary angles in lattice gauge theories close to the continuum. As a first application, we compute the glueball spectrum of the SU(2) gauge theory in 2+1 dimensions for both parities and for spins ranging from 0 up to 4 inclusive. We measure glueball angular wave functions directly, decomposing them in Fourier modes and extrapolating the Fourier coefficients to the continuum. This allows a reliable labelling of the continuum states and gives insight into the way rotation symmetry is recovered. As one of our results, we demonstrate that the D=2+1 SU(2) glueball conventionally labelled as JP=0− is in fact 4− and that the lightest “J=1” state has, in fact, spin 3.