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Beautiful and charming energy correlators

Evan Craft1,*, Kyle Lee2,3,†, Bianka Meçaj1,‡, and Ian Moult1,§

  • *Contact author: evan.craft@yale.edu
  • †Contact author: kylel@mit.edu
  • ‡Contact author: bianka.mecaj@yale.edu
  • §Contact author: ian.moult@yale.edu
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Phys. Rev. D 114, L031501 – Published 3 August, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/4plr-bmv6

Abstract

Understanding the detailed structure of energy flow within jets, a field known as jet substructure, plays a central role in searches for new physics, and precision studies of QCD. Many applications of jet substructure require an understanding of jets initiated by heavy quarks, whose description has lagged behind remarkable recent progress for massless jets. In this Letter, we initiate a study of correlation functions of energy flow operators on beauty and charm jets to illuminate the effects of the intrinsic mass of the elementary particles of QCD. We present a factorization theorem incorporating the mass of heavy quarks, and show that the heavy quark jet functions for energy correlators have a simple structure in perturbation theory. Our results achieve the very first full next-to-leading-logarithmic calculation of the heavy quark jet substructure observable at the LHC. Using this framework, we study the behavior of the correlators, and show that they exhibit a clear transition from a massless scaling regime, at precisely the scale of the heavy quark mass. This manifests the long-sought-after dead-cone effect and illustrates fundamental effects from the intrinsic mass of beauty and charm quarks in a perturbative regime, before they are confined inside hadrons. Our theoretical framework for studying energy correlators using heavy jets has many exciting applications for improving the description of mass effects in next generation parton shower event generators, probing the QGP, and studying heavy flavor fragmentation functions.

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Phys. Rev. D 114, L031501– Published 3 August, 2026
  • Received 6 January 2023
  • Accepted 10 July 2026
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