Top Quark Mass Extractions from Energy Correlators: A Feasibility Study

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that energy correlators can reliably extract the top quark mass with minimal impact from experimental uncertainties and nonperturbative effects, supporting their use in high-precision collider measurements.

Contribution

The paper provides a feasibility analysis showing the robustness of energy correlators for top mass extraction against experimental and theoretical uncertainties.

Findings

Jet energy scale and tracking efficiency uncertainties have minimal impact.

Nonperturbative effects like color reconnection have negligible influence.

Mass measurement shifts are within 100 MeV across model variations.

Abstract

In a recent article, we proposed an energy correlator-based method to achieve a precision top quark mass extraction from jet substructure, using the $W$-boson mass as a standard candle. In this paper, we perform an extensive event generator simulation study of this proposal, testing both its experimental viability, as well as its sensitivity to different subprocesses in the top quark production and decay. On the experimental side, we show that uncertainties in the jet energy scale, constituent energy scale, and tracking efficiency have a minimal effect. On the theoretical side, we find that our observable isolates the perturbative decay of the top quark, while nonperturbative physics, such as the modelling of color reconnection, and underlying event, have a negligible impact on the distribution. We conclude that our proposed measurement is resilient to the experimental and theoretical aspects of the hadron collider environment, with variations in model parameters consistently leading to $\lesssim 100~$MeV shifts in the measured top mass. Our results motivate precision theoretical calculations of the energy correlator on top decays, both analytic and using parton shower generators, and further exploration of the experimental measurement.