| Despite many years of study, a complete understanding of the interactions of quarks and gluons within hadronic states remains elusive. Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) has long predicted the possibility of states in which gluonic excitations can contribute to the characteristics of the state (a hybrid) or even take the place of constituent quarks altogether (a glueball), yet no incontrovertible evidence yet exists. This is partially due to the nature of the low mass spectrum, in which broad, overlapping states make experimental methods challenging. Recent technological improvements and high statistics data sets now enable a rigorous study of regions in which experimentalists may perform fundamental tests of QCD. This dissertation presents one such study, focusing on the pi 0pi0 spectrum. Particular emphasis is placed on the scalar meson spectrum (JPC = 0++), wherein the lightest glueball state is expected.;An amplitude analysis of the pi0pi0 system produced in radiative J/psi decays is presented. A mass independent analysis of the (1.3106 +/- 0.0072) x 10 9 J/psi decays collected by the BESIII detector at BEPCII in Beijing, China is repeated under different model assumptions and experimental conditions. Additionally, the branching ratio of radiative J/psi decays to pi0pi0 is measured to be (1.147+/-0.002+/-0.042) x 10-3, where the first error is statistical and the second is systematic. This is the first measurement of this reaction. |
