The Nucleon Energy Correlators

TL;DR

The paper introduces nucleon energy correlators as a new way to probe the internal structure of nucleons, capturing microscopic details without relying on fragmentation functions or jet algorithms, and demonstrates their measurement in deep inelastic scattering.

Contribution

It proposes nucleon energy correlators as a novel, non-perturbative tool for nucleon tomography, avoiding traditional fragmentation functions and jet clustering.

Findings

Distributions show a phase transition between perturbative and non-perturbative regimes.

A polar angle version of Bjorken scaling is predicted in the perturbative phase.

Potential applications at electron ion colliders with far-forward detectors.

Abstract

We introduce the concept of the nucleon energy correlators, a set of novel objects that encode the microscopic details of a nucleon, such as the parton angular distribution in a nucleon, the collinear splitting to all orders, as well as the internal transverse dynamics of the nucleon. The nucleon energy correlators complement the conventional nucleon/nucleus tomography, but without introducing the non-perturbative fragmentation functions or the jet clustering algorithms. We demonstrate how the nucleon energy correlators can be measured in the lepton-nucleon deep inelastic scattering. The predicted distributions display a fascinating phase transition between the perturbative and non-perturbative regime. In the perturbative phase, a polar angle version of the Bjorken scaling behavior is predicted. We discuss its possible applications and expect it aggrandize the physics content at the electron ion colliders with a far-forward detector.