Projected Energy Correlators and Charged-Jet Universality in QCD

Jet substructure observables provide powerful probes of perturbative and non-perturbative QCD dynamics. We investigate the projected energy correlator, theoretically well-controlled measures of multi-particle energy flow within jets. Using simulated \textit{pp} collisions, we compare projected correlators for two operational jet definitions: (i) charged-only jets, clustered from the subset of charged final-state particles, and (ii) stripped full jets, constructed by removing all neutral constituents from particle-level jets reconstructed from the complete final-state ensemble. Interestingly, the resulting distributions are nearly identical across these two jet definitions. This apparent universality suggests that projected correlators may be insensitive to the charged-jet definition, potentially enabling a direct comparison between experimental measurements restricted to charged jets and theoretical QCD predictions defined over all final-state particles. Ongoing work aims to better understand this correspondence and extend the framework toward studying jet phenomena and extractions of the strong coupling constant $\alpha_s$.