Toward reformulating jet substructure in heavy-ion collisions in terms of energy correlators

by Carlota Andres (Ecole Polytechnique, CPHT)

Monday 16 Oct 2023, 16:00 → 17:30 Europe/Zurich

4/S-030 (CERN)

Recent developments in conformal field theories have motivated the reformulation of collider jet substructure as the study of correlation functions of a specific class of light-ray operators and their associated operator product expansion (OPE). Multi-point correlation functions of these operators have recently been measured in proton-proton collisions at RHIC and the LHC, allowing us to experimentally verify properties of the light-ray OPE. In this talk, we show the first steps toward extending this approach to jet substructure within heavy-ion collisions. Specifically, we compute the in-medium two-point energy-energy correlator for both a massless quark jet and a massive quark jet, showing its remarkable potential for unraveling distinct dynamics. Notably, our analysis for the heavy-flavor jet represents the first example where energy correlators simultaneously resolve both an intrinsic scale, associated with the heavy quark mass, and an emergent scale, arising from the interactions with the QGP.

Based on: 2209.11236 2303.03413 2307.15110