The Impact of Background in N-point Energy Correlators for PbPb Collisions at √s=5.02 TeV

In heavy ion collisions, high-energy partons may ricochet off of each other in a hard scattering, producing a parton shower that evolves as a conical structure as it moves through the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). These structures are known as jets in quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Energy correlators created from the energy-weighted distances between particles in these jets are one of the most widely studied graphs across all the major heavy-ion collaborations because they visualize the different stages of QCD – in order of increasing ΔR: the free hadron phase, the transition region, and the perturbative QGP region. However, in addition to signal particles from the hard scattering, heavy ion collisions often produce a significant number of background particles that contaminate our experimental data. Energy correlators cannot inherently discriminate between signal and background, and the effects of background are not fully understood in N-point energy correlators for N > 2. In this talk, we summarize how these effects evolve with respect to variable jet and collision parameters in PbPb collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) energies in the hope of providing a framework to guide future research on this topic.