Orateur
Description
Energy-energy correlators (EECs) have recently emerged as powerful, rigorously established infrared- and collinear-safe (IRC-safe) observables for probing QCD dynamics in the vacuum. However, their IRC safety and factorization properties in the presence of a nuclear medium remain unexplored. In this talk, I will present the first derivation of QCD factorization at next-to-leading order (NLO) for an energy-flow observable in a physical scattering process involving a nuclear medium. Working within the high-twist framework, we calculate the twist-4 contributions to the angular width of the one-point energy correlator (OPEC) in semi-inclusive deep inelastic electron-ion scattering, explicitly demonstrating the IRC safety of medium-enhanced contributions. We show that the OPEC angular spreading width provides a highly sensitive, hadronization-free probe of transverse momentum broadening in cold nuclear matter. This NLO factorization framework establishes a theoretical foundation for extending energy correlators to a broad class of high-energy processes in nuclear environments and opens the possibility of global analyses of nuclear properties using OPEC observables.
| Working Group | WG3. Precision QCD and hard probes |
|---|---|
| Type of oral contribution | Theory |