Abstract
Collimated sprays of hadrons, called jets, are an emergent phenomenon of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) at collider experiments, whose detailed internal structure encodes valuable information about the interactions of high energy quarks and gluons and their confinement into color-neutral hadrons. The flow of energy within jets is characterized by correlation functions of energy flow operators, with the three-point correlator being the first correlator with nontrivial shape dependence, playing a special role in unraveling the dynamics of QCD. In this Letter, we initiate a study of the three-point energy correlator to all orders in the strong coupling constant, in the limit where two of the detectors are squeezed together. We show that, by rotating the two squeezed detectors with respect to the third by an angle ϕ, a cos(2ϕ) dependence arising from the quantum interference between intermediate virtual gluons with +/- helicity is imprinted on the detector. This can be regarded as a double slit experiment performed with jet substructure, and it provides a direct probe of the ultimately quantum nature of the substructure of jets and of transverse spin physics in QCD. To facilitate our all-orders analysis, we adopt the operator product expansion (OPE) for light-ray operators in conformal field theory and develop it in QCD. Our application of the light-ray OPE in real world QCD establishes it as a powerful theoretical tool with broad applications for the study of jet substructure.
Highlights
Introduction.—Jet substructure, which was originally developed to exploit the flow of energy within jets of particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to enhance new physics searches [1], has since emerged as a primary technique for studying quantum chromodynamics (QCD)
In this Letter, we show that the squeezed limit of the threepoint correlator [21] hEðn 1ÞEðn 2ÞEðn 3Þi, where two detectors are brought together n 2 → n 3, is a direct probe of quantum interference between helicity λ 1⁄4 Æ gluons in the jet, i.e., the transverse spin structure of QCD, and that this is imprinted on the detector as a cosð2φÞ interference pattern
In this Letter, we show that the light-ray operator product expansion (OPE) can be applied in QCD and provides powerful operator-based techniques for jet substructure
Summary
Collimated sprays of hadrons, called jets, are an emergent phenomenon of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) at collider experiments, whose detailed internal structure encodes valuable information about the interactions of high energy quarks and gluons and their confinement into color-neutral hadrons. The two-point correlator exhibits a scaling behavior [9,15,16,17,18,19,20] hEðn 1ÞEðn 2Þi ∼ 1=θ212−2γðαsÞ This scaling probes the value of the strong coupling constant αs and has been computed to next-to-next-toleading logarithm in QCD [19]. In this Letter, we show that the squeezed limit of the threepoint correlator [21] hEðn 1ÞEðn 2ÞEðn 3Þi, where two detectors are brought together n 2 → n 3, is a direct probe of quantum interference between helicity λ 1⁄4 Æ gluons in the jet, i.e., the transverse spin structure of QCD, and that this is imprinted on the detector as a cosð2φÞ interference pattern.
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