Scaling violation in power corrections to energy correlators from the light-ray OPE

TL;DR

This paper investigates non-perturbative power corrections to energy correlators at small angles using the light-ray OPE, revealing quantum violations of classical scaling and providing testable predictions for collider experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of power corrections in energy correlators via light-ray OPE, highlighting quantum scaling violations and their calculable dependence on the hard scale.

Findings

Power corrections follow classical scaling at leading order.

Quantum effects cause violations of classical scaling.

Predictions match Monte Carlo simulations for collider data.

Abstract

In recent years, energy correlators have emerged as a powerful tool to explore the field theoretic structure of strong interactions at particle colliders. In this Letter we initiate a novel study of the non-perturbative power corrections to the projected $N$-point energy correlators in the limit where the angle between the detectors is small. Using the light-ray operator product expansion (OPE) as a guiding principle, we derive the power corrections in terms of two non-perturbative quantities describing the fragmentation of quarks and gluons. In analogy with their perturbative leading-power counterpart, we show that power corrections obey a classical scaling behavior that is violated at the quantum level. This crucially results in a dependence on the hard scale $Q$ of the problem that is calculable in perturbation theory. Our analytic predictions are successfully tested against Monte Carlo simulations for both lepton and hadron colliders, marking a significant step forward in the understanding of these observables.