Beautiful and charming energy correlators
- 1Yale University
- 2Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- 3Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Understanding the detailed structure of energy flow within jets, a field known as jet substructure, plays a central role in searches for new physics, and precision studies of QCD. Many applications of jet substructure require an understanding of jets initiated by heavy quarks, whose description has lagged behind remarkable recent progress for massless jets. In this Letter, we initiate a study of correlation functions of energy flow operators on beauty and charm jets to illuminate the effects of the intrinsic mass of the elementary particles of QCD. We present a factorization theorem incorporating the mass of heavy quarks, and show that the heavy quark jet functions for energy correlators have a simple structure in perturbation theory. Our results achieve the very first full next-to-leading-logarithmic calculation of the heavy quark jet substructure observable at the LHC. Using this framework, we study the behavior of the correlators, and show that they exhibit a clear transition from a massless scaling regime, at precisely the scale of the heavy quark mass. This manifests the long-sought-after dead-cone effect and illustrates fundamental effects from the intrinsic mass of beauty and charm quarks in a perturbative regime, before they are confined inside hadrons. Our theoretical framework for studying energy correlators using heavy jets has many exciting applications for improving the description of mass effects in next generation parton shower event generators, probing the QGP, and studying heavy flavor fragmentation functions.
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BibTeX
@article{craft2026beautiful,
title = {{Beautiful and charming energy correlators}},
author = {Evan Craft and Kyle Lee and Bianka Meçaj and Ian Moult},
journal = {Physical review. D/Physical review. D.},
year = {2026},
month = jul,
doi = {10.1103/4plr-bmv6},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1103/4plr-bmv6},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Beautiful and charming energy correlators
AU - Evan Craft
AU - Kyle Lee
AU - Bianka Meçaj
AU - Ian Moult
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/07/10
JO - Physical review. D/Physical review. D.
DO - 10.1103/4plr-bmv6
UR - https://doi.org/10.1103/4plr-bmv6
AB - Understanding the detailed structure of energy flow within jets, a field known as jet substructure, plays a central role in searches for new physics, and precision studies of QCD. Many applications of jet substructure require an understanding of jets initiated by heavy quarks, whose description has lagged behind remarkable recent progress for massless jets. In this Letter, we initiate a study of correlation functions of energy flow operators on beauty and charm jets to illuminate the effects of the intrinsic mass of the elementary particles of QCD. We present a factorization theorem incorporating the mass of heavy quarks, and show that the heavy quark jet functions for energy correlators have a simple structure in perturbation theory. Our results achieve the very first full next-to-leading-logarithmic calculation of the heavy quark jet substructure observable at the LHC. Using this framework, we study the behavior of the correlators, and show that they exhibit a clear transition from a massless scaling regime, at precisely the scale of the heavy quark mass. This manifests the long-sought-after dead-cone effect and illustrates fundamental effects from the intrinsic mass of beauty and charm quarks in a perturbative regime, before they are confined inside hadrons. Our theoretical framework for studying energy correlators using heavy jets has many exciting applications for improving the description of mass effects in next generation parton shower event generators, probing the QGP, and studying heavy flavor fragmentation functions.
SN - 2470-0010
SN - 2470-0029
SN - 2470-0037
ER -