Light meson spectroscopy at e⁺e⁻ machines

The study of light hadrons is central to the understanding of confinement–a unique property of QCD. The quark model describs mesons as bound states of quarks and antiquarks. LQCD and QCD-motivated models for hadrons, however, predict a richer spectrum of mesons that takes into account not only the quark degrees of freedom but also the gluonic degrees of freedom. A selection of recent progress in the light-quark sector with unprecedented high-statistics data sets from e⁺e⁻ experiments are reviewed.