Testing gluon self-interactions in three-jet events at hadron colliders

Abstract

The effective operator tr( G 3) is the only CP-even dimension-6 gluonic operator that cannot be related to four-quark operators. A peculiar property of this operator is that it does not contribute to two-jet production at hadron colliders, at the level of one operator insertion and leading order in α s; therefore we study its effects on three-jet events. To calculate the helicity amplitudes induced by this operator we make extensive use of collinear factorization. We propose several ways of detecting the tr( G 3) signal, one of which exploits its non-trivial behavior under azimuthal rotations of two almost collinear jets.