Exploring hadronization and non-perturbative physics via jet substructure

Jets are algorithmic proxies of hard scattered quarks/gluons that are created in collisions of high energy particles. The last few years has seen an explosion of jet substructure results derived from exploiting clustering algorithms, both via analysis techniques and experimental data. Such measurements have resulted in the theoretical community extending perturbative calculations to higher orders that are now capable of describing precise substructure data in pp collisions across two orders of magnitude in center of mass energy. Since jets are multi-scale objects, they encode information about both the perturbative (pQCD) parton shower and non-perturbative (npQCD) physics including hadronization. In this talk, to study the pQCD to npQCD transition across various collision systems, we discuss the utility of the formation time which is a substructure observable calculated from splits from the jet clustering tree and simultaneously via charged particles in the final state. We present Monte Carlo studies of the formation time and discuss them in the context of recent work on such observables in heavy ion collisions where they potentially enable a time dependent tomography of the deconfined medium.