Energy correlators of hadronically decaying electroweak bosons

Abstract

Energy correlators are field-theoretically clean and phenomenologically valuable probes of QCD dynamics. We explore the possibility of using the information encoded in the energy correlators of a hadronically decaying electroweak vector boson in order to extract its full decay density matrix. The kinematics of the one- and two-point energy correlators can indeed discriminate between longitudinal and transverse modes and reveal the interference pattern between different vector polarizations. Such observables improve the sensitivity to microscopic new physics affecting the production rate of the different helicities. We assess the impact on higher-dimensional effective field theory operators in simple scenarios.

Topics & Concepts