Mark Gonzalez

Fully leveraging the capabilities of particle colliders like the Large Hadron Collider to further study and constrain the Standard Model requires the continual development of observables which keenly probe the relevant physics, are accessible to current or near term experiments, and are underpinned by well-defined, field-theoretic objects. One such observable with applications to studies of the strong interaction and quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is the energy correlator (EEC). As a jet substructure observable, energy correlators have already been used to measure the strong coupling constant and show promise in revealing properties of confinement, the quark-gluon plasma, and heavy quark effects. We will formulate the energy correlator both in terms of a weighted cross section and the correlation function of light-ray operators in a conformal field theory, revealing its phenomenological and formal properties. We will then use these properties to construct novel energy correlator observables, including the three-point energy correlator for heavy quark jets, the four-point energy correlator in QCD for particular kinematic limits, and correlators which measure powers of particle energy. Throughout, we will discuss applications of these observables which include precision measurements, studies of the light-ray operator product expansion, and non-perturbative functions in QCD.