Jack Holguin

University of Manchester, UK, March 7, 12:00 pm

Revealing simple scaling laws in heavy ion jets with Energy Correlators

The quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is an extreme state of hot nuclear matter. Small QGP droplets are produced in heavy-ion collisions at collider experiments, leaving imprints on the radiation sprays (jets) generated in these events. Recently, the CMS Collaboration released the first measurements of energy correlators on jets in lead-lead collisions, revealing significant modifications compared to proton-proton baselines. These modifications establish energy correlators as powerful probes of QGP properties. However, interpreting these results is challenging due to experimental biases that complicate the measurement.

I will discuss the first analytical predictions for these measurements and introduce a novel energy-energy correlator (EEC) cross-ratio that reduces biases by an order of magnitude while preserving sensitivity to the QGP. Using the light-ray operator product expansion, I will also show that nuclear modifications in this measurement are characterised by an enhanced twist-4 matrix element, which directly encodes properties of the quark-gluon plasma.