Accounting for coherence in interjet E_t flow: a case study

Abstract

Recently, interest has developed in the distribution of interjet energy flows, with for example the leading-log calculation of the highly non-trivial colour structure of primary emissions in 4-jet systems. Here we point out however that at leading-log level it is insufficient to consider only multiple primary emission from the underlying hard antenna -- additionally, one must take into account the coherent structure of emission from arbitrarily complicated ensembles of large-angle soft gluons. Similar considerations apply to certain definitions of rapidity gaps based on energy flow. We examine this new class of terms in the simpler context of 2-jet events, and discover features that point at novel aspects of the QCD dynamics.