Speaker
Description
One of the fundamental challenges in studying QCD and jet physics is the different effective degrees of freedom at different energy scales. The hard scattering processes which form jets, as well as the jet evolution, are described in terms of weakly-interacting partons, whereas the particles we observe in our detectors and do measurements on are free hadrons. Theoretically, this means one does calculations with partons as the relevant degrees of freedom and then appropriately translates the parton level predictions into some statement on the distribution of hadrons. In other words, this amounts to some understanding of matrix elements between partonic and hadronic states. In this work, we develop this procedure for multi-point correlation functions of general detector operators in a confining field theory, specifically QCD. This class of detector operators generalize the ANE operator $\mathcal{E}$, from which the energy correlator is built, and are sensitive to generic powers of energy measured on an arbitrary subset of hadrons. In order to describe these more general detector operators, we introduce a broad set of universal, non-perturbative “detector functions,” enabling us to derive factorization theorems which separate perturbative and non-perturbative physics. We also study the leading non-perturbative corrections to these observables in QCD, which are large enough to significantly modify the perturbative scaling, and perform a numerical study using parton shower simulations, showing that we are able to describe the complicated behavior of these more general correlators. This work significantly broadens the space of detector operators over which we have theoretical control, including those that are compelling for phenomenological studies. Most notably, the ability to increase the energy weighting can significantly suppress the effects of soft particles, which is a useful feature in heavy-ion studies.