The Nucleon Energy Correlators

Abstract

We introduce the concept of the nucleon energy correlators, a set of novel objects that encode the microscopic details of a nucleon, such as the parton angular distribution in a nucleon, the collinear splitting to all orders, as well as the internal transverse dynamics of the nucleon. The nucleon energy correlators complement the conventional nucleon/nucleus tomography, but without introducing the non-perturbative fragmentation functions or the jet clustering algorithms. We demonstrate how the nucleon energy correlators can be measured in the lepton-nucleon deep inelastic scattering. The predicted distributions display a fascinating phase transition between the perturbative and non-perturbative regime. In the perturbative phase, a polar angle version of the Bjorken scaling behavior is predicted. We discuss its possible applications and expect it aggrandize the physics content at the electron ion colliders with a far-forward detector.