Nucleon Energy Correlators as a Probe of Light-Quark Dipole Operators at the Electron-Ion Collider

TL;DR

This paper introduces nucleon energy correlators as a new, inclusive method to probe light-quark dipole operators at electron-ion colliders, enabling linear constraints without polarized beams or hadron identification.

Contribution

It develops a novel framework using energy correlators to detect chirality-flipping quark interactions through azimuthal asymmetries in unpolarized deep inelastic scattering.

Findings

Constructed a chiral-odd quark NEC sensitive to quark transverse spin.

Demonstrated that energy correlator asymmetries provide linear constraints on quark dipole couplings.

Showed the approach does not require polarized beams or hadron identification.

Abstract

We propose nucleon energy correlators (NECs) as a novel framework to probe electroweak light-quark dipole operators in deep inelastic scattering with an unpolarized nucleon. These operators encode chirality-flipping interactions, whose effects are usually quadratically suppressed in unpolarized cross sections. We construct a chiral-odd quark NEC that accesses quark transverse spin via azimuthal angle asymmetries in the energy flow of the target fragmentation region. These asymmetries serve as clean and powerful observables, enabling linear constraints on the quark dipole couplings. Unlike existing methods, our approach requires neither polarized nucleon beams nor final-state hadron identification, relying instead on fully inclusive calorimetric measurements. This work establishes one of the first applications of energy correlator observables to new physics searches and opens a promising direction for precision studies of chirality-flipping effects at electron-ion colliders.