Leveraging the gluon splitting to heavy quarks for phenomenology

The quark-gluon plasma produced in heavy-ion collisions provides unique access to many-body phenomena in QCD. This high temperature phase of QCD matter can be studied through its interactions with high-energy partons, called jets, via the modification of the structure of jets compared to the vacuum. However, key features of the QCD medium modification – for example, medium-induced momentum broadening of high-energy partons, and the dependence of medium modification on the formation time of QCD radiation – have remained obscured in measurements. I will show that this is in substantial part due to mixing between the features of quark and gluon jets, and how experimental access to the gluon splitting to heavy quarks can bypass many of these challenges. I will demonstrate how both standard jet substructure measurements, and new approaches based on energy correlations inside of jets, can be leveraged to gain unprecedented access to the QCD medium modification in heavy-ion collisions.