THE PHYSICS OF GLUEBALLS

Glueballs are particles whose valence degrees of freedom are gluons and therefore in their description the gauge field plays a dominant role. We review recent results in the physics of glueballs with the aim set on phenomenology and discuss the possibility of finding them in conventional hadronic experiments and in the Quark Gluon Plasma. In order to describe their properties we resort to a variety of theoretical treatments which include, lattice QCD,constituent models, AdS/QCD methods, and QCD sum rules. The review is supposed to be an informed guide to the literature. Therefore, we do not discuss in detail technical developments but refer the reader to the appropriate references.