Jets of hadrons produced at high-energy colliders provide experimental access to the dynamics of asymptotically free quarks and gluons and their confinement into hadrons. Motivated by recent developments in conformal field theory, we propose a reformulation of jet substructure as the study of correlation functions of a specific class of light-ray operators and their associated operator product expansion (OPE). We show that multi-point correlation functions of these operators can be measured in real LHC data, allowing us to experimentally verify properties of the light-ray OPE. We then discuss how this reformulation provides new ways of experimentally studying the Standard Model at colliders, as well as new theoretical techniques for performing calculations in QCD.
Matt Sullivan