HEP Seminar - Conformal Colliders Meet the LHC

HEP Seminar - Conformal Colliders Meet the LHC
Ian Moult, Yale University
Abstract: Jets of hadrons produced at high-energy colliders provide experimental access to the dynamics of asymptotically free quarks and gluons and their confinement into hadrons. Motivated by recent developments in conformal field theory, we propose a reformulation of jet substructure as the study of correlation functions of a specific class of light-ray operators and their associated operator product expansion (OPE). We show that multi-point correlation functions of these operators can be measured in real LHC data, allowing us to experimentally verify properties of the light-ray OPE. We then discuss how this reformulation provides new ways of experimentally studying the Standard Model at colliders, as well as new theoretical techniques for performing calculations in QCD.