WIDG Seminar: Ananya Rai, Yale, “N-point energy correlator measurements in p-p at ALICE”

Jets are collimated sprays of hadrons focused in the direction of the initially scattered parton in a high-energy particle collision. These collisions are produced at particle colliders such as the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Although we only access the final state hadrons, the sequential clustering of these particles into jets offers an algorithmic connection of these hadrons to the partons of the radiation shower. Furthermore, the ability to map these final particles to the initial quark or gluon that created them makes jets a valuable tool to probe quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Observables connected to the jet’s radiation history are called jet substructure observables. A recently proposed jet substructure observable, N-point energy correlator (NEC), improves the traditional approach that relies on the clustering history.
The NEC is a compelling observable to study because it allows us to directly map the energy flow in detectors onto that calculable in theory from first principles. Additionally, it depicts a clean separation between the perturbative (partonic) and non-perturbative (hadronic) regimes, a unique property of this observable. Extending the NEC to the heavy flavor quarks brings new degrees of freedom that remain unexplored experimentally. Recent calculations for the 2-point energy correlator (EEC) show modifications for the heavy-flavor jets due to mass effects. The first step to probing these effects in data requires finding the heavy quarks. At ALICE, charm jets are found by tagging D0 mesons, the lightest particle containing a charm quark. In this talk, I will discuss my ongoing efforts at ALICE to measure the N-point energy correlators in p-p collisions for D0-tagged jets at 13TeV. Finally, I will provide an outlook for measuring these observable in heavy-ion collisions to probe the quark-gluon plasma.