Jet substructure in heavy-ion collisions with energy correlators

Abstract

Recent developments in conformal field theories have motivated a 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 apply this approach to jet substructure in heavy-ion collisions. Specifically, we compute the two-point energy-energy correlator of an in-medium massive quark jet, and reveal its remarkable potential to disentangle the different scales of the problem, as they are imprinted into the angular scales of the correlator spectra. In particular, our analysis represents the first example where energy correlators simultaneously resolve both an intrinsic scale, associated with the heavy quark, and an emergent scale, originating from the interactions with the medium.