In particle physics, a glueball (also gluonium, gluon-ball) is a hypothetical composite particle. It consists solely of gluon particles, without valence quarks. Such a state is possible because gluons carry color charge and experience the strong interaction between themselves. Glueballs are extremely difficult to identify in particle accelerators, because they mix with ordinary meson states. In pure gauge theory, glueballs are the only states of the spectrum and some of them are stable.