ν-point energy correletors with FastEEC: Small-x physics from LHC jets

In recent years, energy correlators have emerged as a powerful tool for studying jet substructure, with promising applications such as probing the hadronization transition, analyzing the quark-gluon plasma, and improving the precision of top quark mass measurements. The projected N-point correlator...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ankita Budhraja, Hao Chen, Wouter J. Waalewijn
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier 2025-02-01
Series:Physics Letters B
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Online Access:http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269324007974
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Summary:In recent years, energy correlators have emerged as a powerful tool for studying jet substructure, with promising applications such as probing the hadronization transition, analyzing the quark-gluon plasma, and improving the precision of top quark mass measurements. The projected N-point correlator measures correlations between N final-state particles by tracking the largest separation between them, showing a scaling behavior related to DGLAP splitting functions. These correlators can be analytically continued in N, commonly referred to as ν-correlators, allowing access to non-integer moments of the splitting functions. Of particular interest is the ν→0 limit, where the small momentum fraction behavior of the splitting functions requires resummation. Originally, the computational complexity of evaluating ν-correlators for M particles scaled as 22M, making it impractical for real-world analyses. However, by using recursion, we reduce this to M2M, and through the FastEEC method of dynamically resolving subjets, M is replaced by the number of subjets. This breakthrough enables, for the first time, the computation of ν-correlators for LHC data. In practice, limiting the number of subjets to 16 is sufficient to achieve percent-level precision, which we validate using known integer-ν results and convergence tests for non-integer ν. We have implemented this in an update to FastEEC and conducted an initial study of power-law scaling in the perturbative regime as a function of ν, using CMS Open Data on jets. The results agree with DGLAP evolution, except at small ν, where the anomalous dimension saturates to a value that matches the BFKL anomalous dimension.
ISSN:0370-2693