On May 17, 2026, the [NanGaoShi·Physics Lecture] series hosted by the School of Physical Science and Technology at Nanjing Normal University was held in Room 437 of the Xingjian Building. Professor Hua-Xing Zhu, a renowned theoretical physicist from the School of Physics at Peking University, was invited to deliver an academic lecture titled "From Correlation Function to Charge Correlator" to the faculty and students. The lecture was chaired by Professor Rui-Lin Zhu of the School of Physical Science and Technology, with multiple faculty members and graduate students from related disciplines attending the academic event.

In this report, Prof. Zhu detailed the cutting-edge progress in generalizing from the energy-energy correlator to the charge correlator within quantum chromodynamics. When handling higher-order calculations for charge correlators, traditional perturbative QCD often faces massive theoretical challenges due to the "infrared unsafety" problem caused by soft wide-angle splitting. To overcome this flaw, Prof. Zhu's team took an innovative approach, ingeniously combining Soft-Collinear Effective Theory with Conformal Field Theory techniques. By introducing the "conformal bridge" method, the theory was analytically continued to the Wilson-Fisher fixed point and then processed through a light transform, successfully evading the divergence difficulties present in direct calculations.

Prof. Zhu emphasized a core highlight of this analytical framework during the presentation: in the back-to-back limit, the charge-charge correlator was strictly proven to be infrared safe at the leading power, and the results aligned highly with Monte Carlo simulations. Moreover, the research discovered that the infrared divergence that appears when deviating from the back-to-back limit is not a physical "dead end"; rather, its scale evolution is governed by the BFKL trajectory. This finding provides an extremely sensitive new probe for exploring the QCD color confinement phase transition and hadronization mechanisms.

At the conclusion of the report, Prof. Zhu summarized the significant advantages of this method, which utilizes conformal symmetry to handle complex QCD infrared divergences. The successful application of this cross-disciplinary analytical method not only provides new insights for precisely calculating jet substructures at colliders but will also greatly encourage its widespread use in future studies of more complex theoretical physics and non-perturbative QCD phenomena. During the interactive Q&A session, the attending faculty and students engaged in in-depth exchanges and enthusiastic discussions with Prof. Zhu on frontier topics such as effective field theories and experimental measurements. This academic report not only broadened the research horizons of the attendees but also laid a solid foundation for future interdisciplinary theoretical collaborations.

Speaker Biography:

Hua Xing Zhu is a Boya Distinguished Professor at the School of Physics, Peking University. He received his bachelor's and doctoral degrees from Peking University in 2007 and 2012, respectively. Following this, he conducted postdoctoral research at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 2017 to 2023, he served as a Hundred Talents Program Researcher at Zhejiang University, and since 2023, he has been a tenured associate professor and professor at Peking University. Prof. Zhu's primary research areas include quantum field theory and particle physics, as well as the interdisciplinary field of physics and artificial intelligence. He was selected for the Overseas High-Level Young Talents Program in 2016, received the Qiushi Outstanding Young Scholar Award in 2020, was funded by the Asian Young Scientist Fellowship in 2023, and was awarded the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars in 2024.