Energy Correlators of Hadronically Decaying Electroweak Bosons

TL;DR

This paper investigates how energy correlators of hadronically decaying electroweak bosons can be used to determine their polarization states and probe new physics effects through their decay density matrices.

Contribution

It introduces a method to extract the full decay density matrix of electroweak bosons using energy correlators, enhancing sensitivity to new physics and polarization effects.

Findings

Energy correlators can distinguish longitudinal and transverse boson modes.

Correlators reveal interference patterns between different polarizations.

Method improves sensitivity to higher-dimensional EFT operators.

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 EFT operators in simple scenarios.