Contributor info: Dr Andrew Larkoski

Andrew J. Larkoski

SciPost Phys. 14, 041 (2023) · published 20 March 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

The large-$N_c$ or topologically planar limit of gauge theories can be considered as a classical limit because all gauge bosons are distinguishable particles and therefore cannot exhibit interference. Quantum effects due to the flow of color therefore arise starting at subleading in $1/N_c$. We introduce kinematic observables explicitly sensitive to effects at subleading color formed from the ratio of interfering to squared color-ordered amplitudes. Such observables are in general not infrared and collinear safe, so we introduce angular observables defined from appropriate multi-point energy correlators motivated by the form of color-ordered amplitudes. We demonstrate that color interference effects are manifest as sinusoidal oscillation in the simplest system, a collinear jet with three particles, and show the limitations of predicting this observable in all-purpose, leading-color parton shower Monte Carlos.

Andy Buckley, Giuseppe Callea, Andrew J. Larkoski, Simone Marzani

SciPost Phys. 9, 026 (2020) · published 26 August 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

We present a novel approach to construct a color tagger, i.e. an observable that is able to discriminate the decay of a color-singlet into two jets from a two-jet background in a different color configuration. We do this by explicitly taking the ratio of the corresponding leading-order matrix elements in the soft limit, thus obtaining an observable that is provably optimal within our approximation. We call this observable the "jet color ring" and we compare its performance to other color-sensitive observables such as jet pull and dipolarity. We also assess the performance of the jet color ring in simulations by applying it to the case of the hadronic decays of a boosted Higgs boson and of an electroweak boson.