Quantum Interference in Jet Substructure from Spinning Gluons

Abstract

Collimated sprays of hadrons, called jets, are an emergent phenomenon of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) at collider experiments, whose detailed internal structure encodes valuable information about the interactions of high energy quarks and gluons, and their confinement into color-neutral hadrons. The flow of energy within jets is characterized by correlation functions of energy flow operators, with the three-point correlator, being the first correlator with non-trivial shape dependence, playing a special role in unravelling the dynamics of QCD. In this Letter we initiate a study of the three-point energy correlator to all orders in the strong coupling constant, in the limit where two of the detectors are squeezed together. We show that by rotating the two squeezed detectors with respect to the third by an angle $\phi$, a $\cos (2\phi)$ dependence arising from the quantum interference between intermediate virtual gluons with $+/-$ helicity is imprinted on the detector. This can be regarded as a double slit experiment performed with jet substructure, and it provides a direct probe of the ultimately quantum nature of the substructure of jets, and of transverse spin physics in QCD. To facilitate our all-orders analysis, we adopt the Operator Product Expansion (OPE) for light-ray operators in conformal field theory and develop it in QCD. Our application of the light-ray OPE in real world QCD establishes it as a powerful theoretical tool with broad applications for the study of jet substructure.