Precision Studies of Boosted Polarized Vector Bosons with Energy Correlators
Abstract
Boosted, hadronically decaying W and Z bosons are among the most abundant heavy objects at colliders, and their vector nature makes their substructure qualitatively richer than that of a scalar. We initiate precision studies of the hadronic decays of boosted polarized vector bosons with energy correlators. In the narrow-width limit, the laboratory-frame two-point energy correlator is a sum of longitudinal and transverse decay spectra, each weighted by its polarized production rate and obtained by a closed-form boost kernel acting on rest-frame correlators. Combining polarized production density matrices, computed at NNLO in QCD for pp→ V+X and at leading order for e+e-→ W+W-, with decay correlators that combine NNLO fixed order with NNLL collinear and N4LL back-to-back resummation, we find for high-pT W/Z production that polarization shifts the spectrum by 𝒪(10%) relative to a naive unpolarized treatment. Even without any reconstruction, hadronic W/Z decays stand out over the realistic QCD background of untagged jet samples as a localized angular bump. Our results open the door to using energy correlators for polarimetry of electroweak bosons through their hadronic decays, for standard-candle measurements of electroweak bosons inside jets, and in sharper searches for new resonances.
Related
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BibTeX
@misc{gao2026precision,
title = {{Precision Studies of Boosted Polarized Vector Bosons with Energy Correlators}},
author = {Anjie Gao and Kyle Lee and Xiaoyuan Zhang},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.38688},
eprint = {2610.38688},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38688},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Precision Studies of Boosted Polarized Vector Bosons with Energy Correlators
AU - Anjie Gao
AU - Kyle Lee
AU - Xiaoyuan Zhang
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/28
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.38688
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38688
AB - Boosted, hadronically decaying W and Z bosons are among the most abundant heavy objects at colliders, and their vector nature makes their substructure qualitatively richer than that of a scalar. We initiate precision studies of the hadronic decays of boosted polarized vector bosons with energy correlators. In the narrow-width limit, the laboratory-frame two-point energy correlator is a sum of longitudinal and transverse decay spectra, each weighted by its polarized production rate and obtained by a closed-form boost kernel acting on rest-frame correlators. Combining polarized production density matrices, computed at NNLO in QCD for pp→ V+X and at leading order for e^+e^-→ W^+W^-, with decay correlators that combine NNLO fixed order with NNLL collinear and N^4LL back-to-back resummation, we find for high-p_T W/Z production that polarization shifts the spectrum by 𝒪(10%) relative to a naive unpolarized treatment. Even without any reconstruction, hadronic W/Z decays stand out over the realistic QCD background of untagged jet samples as a localized angular bump. Our results open the door to using energy correlators for polarimetry of electroweak bosons through their hadronic decays, for standard-candle measurements of electroweak bosons inside jets, and in sharper searches for new resonances.
ER -