Speaker
Description
We propose the first moments of electric-charge, baryon-number, and strangeness flows into jets as direct probes of the flavor composition and diquark content of the QCD vacuum excitations during hadronization. Current conservation laws render these moments invariant under renormalization-group evolution, while color triality constrains the allowed screening states at the endpoint of the associated Wilson line. In a minimal screening picture, the baryon-number flow in a quark jet of flavor $f$ obeys $\langle B_{\rm flow}\rangle_f \simeq r_{qq}/(1+r_{qq})$, where $r_{qq}$ is the relative production weight of diquark--antidiquark and quark--antiquark vacuum excitations. If the pair-production weights among different flavors satisfy $u\bar u:d\bar d:s\bar s=1:1:r_s$, the strangeness flow obeys $\langle S_{\rm flow}\rangle_f \simeq S_f+\frac{3r_s}{2+r_s}\left(\frac{1}{3}-\langle B_{\rm flow}\rangle_f\right)$, predicting a nonzero net strangeness even in $u$- and $d$-initiated jets. The charge flow obeys an analogous relation, and isospin-symmetric pair production makes the three flows satisfy the Gell-Mann--Nishijima relation $\langle Q_{\rm flow}\rangle_f \simeq I_{3,f} +\frac{1}{2}\left(\langle B_{\rm flow}\rangle_f+\langle S_{\rm flow}\rangle_f\right)$, providing an internal consistency condition among the three observables. Event-generator studies reproduce these relations and demonstrate that joint measurements of $Q$, $B$, and $S$ can separately constrain $r_{qq}$ and $r_s$, providing a flavor-resolved probe of vacuum pair production and quantum-number transport during jet hadronization.
