Ian Moult

Ian Moult
Born	Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
🏳️ Citizenship	Canadian
🎓 Alma mater	University of British Columbia (B.Sc., 2011) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 2016)
💼 Occupation
Known for	Jet substructure Energy correlators Effective field theory
🏅 Awards	Sloan Research Fellowship (2025) IUPAP Early Career Scientist Prize in Particle Physics (2024) Wu-Ki Tung Award for Early-Career Research on QCD (2024) J. J. and Noriko Sakurai Dissertation Award (2017)
🌐 Website	physics.yale.edu/people/ian-moult

Ian J. Moult is a Canadian theoretical particle physicist and assistant professor of physics at Yale University, where he is a member of the Particle Theory Group and Wright Lab. His research focuses on developing new techniques in quantum field theory for describing high-energy particle physics experiments, with applications ranging from dark matter detection to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). He is known for his contributions to jet substructure and for pioneering the study of energy correlators as probes of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and connections to conformal field theory.

Education

Moult grew up in Vancouver, Canada, and received his B.Sc. from the University of British Columbia in 2011. He obtained his Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2016, supervised by Iain W. Stewart. His doctoral dissertation developed novel techniques for jet substructure calculations, including new observables for tagging boosted electroweak bosons and helicity operator methods for studying quantum interference effects involving the Higgs boson.

Career

Following his doctorate, Moult held postdoctoral positions at the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics and the University of California, Berkeley (2016–2019), and at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University (2019–2021). He joined the Yale University Department of Physics as an assistant professor in 2021.

Research

Jet substructure

Moult has played a leading role in the development of jet substructure, a set of techniques that exploit the internal structure of jets at the LHC to search for new physics and probe the Standard Model. A central theme in his work is the use of effective field theories, particularly soft-collinear effective theory (SCET), to enable precision calculations relevant for collider experiments.

During his doctoral research, Moult developed power-counting methods for jet observables and introduced analytic techniques for discriminating boosted heavy particles from QCD backgrounds. He co-authored an influential review of jet substructure with Andrew Larkoski and Benjamin Nachman, covering both theoretical developments and machine learning techniques.

Moult also introduced the method of convolved substructure (CSS), which uses analytic understanding of jet observables to decorrelate their distributions from the jet mass, with applications to searches for light new particles at the LHC.

Energy correlators

Moult has been a pioneer in developing energy correlators as precision probes of QCD and their connections to formal quantum field theory. Energy correlators measure the energy deposited in multiple detectors as a function of the angles between them, and are described theoretically by energy flow operators.

With Lance Dixon and Hua Xing Zhu, Moult derived the factorization formula for the energy-energy correlator (EEC) in the collinear limit, enabling resummation of logarithmically enhanced contributions to all orders in a generic quantum field theory. He and collaborators subsequently computed the three-point energy correlator in the collinear limit, uncovering an intriguing duality between energy correlator integrals and Feynman parameter integrals for loop amplitudes, and revealing connections between jet substructure observables and conformal field theory.

A number of the energy correlator observables introduced by Moult and collaborators have since been measured experimentally at the LHC by the CMS and ALICE collaborations, as well as in heavy-ion collisions, providing new probes of the quark–gluon plasma. At Yale, several experimental measurements of energy correlators were first demonstrated by members of the heavy-ion group at Wright Lab.

Other contributions

Moult has also worked on the infrared structure of gauge theories, subleading corrections in soft-collinear effective theory, and applications of machine learning to jet physics, including work on boosting Higgs boson identification using deep learning techniques.

Awards and honors

• Sloan Research Fellowship in Physics (2025)
• IUPAP Early Career Scientist Prize in Particle Physics (2024)
• Wu-Ki Tung Award for Early-Career Research on QCD (2024)
• J. J. and Noriko Sakurai Dissertation Award in Theoretical Particle Physics, American Physical Society (2017)
• Andrew M. Lockett Memorial Fund Award for Graduate Research, MIT (2015)
• Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Postgraduate Fellowship (2012–2015)

Selected publications

• Larkoski, Andrew J.; Moult, Ian; Nachman, Benjamin (2020). "Jet Substructure at the Large Hadron Collider: A Review of Recent Advances in Theory and Machine Learning". Physics Reports. 841: 1–63. arXiv:1709.04464. doi:10.1016/j.physrep.2019.11.001.
• Dixon, Lance J.; Moult, Ian; Zhu, Hua Xing (2019). "Collinear limit of the energy-energy correlator". Physical Review D. 100 (1): 014009. arXiv:1905.01310. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.100.014009.
• Chen, Hao; Luo, Ming-Xing; Moult, Ian; Yang, Tong-Zhi; Zhang, Xiaoyuan; Zhu, Hua Xing (2020). "Three-Point Energy Correlators in the Collinear Limit: Symmetries, Dualities and Analytic Results". Journal of High Energy Physics. 2020 (8): 028. arXiv:1912.11050. doi:10.1007/JHEP08(2020)028.
• {Moult, Ian; Zhu, Hua Xing (2025). "Energy Correlators: A Journey From Theory to Experiment". arXiv:2506.09119 [hep-ph].
• Larkoski, Andrew J.; Moult, Ian; Neill, Duff (2016). "Analytic Boosted Boson Discrimination". Journal of High Energy Physics. 2016 (5): 117. arXiv:1507.03018. doi:10.1007/JHEP05(2016)117.

External links

• Yale Department of Physics – Ian Moult
• Wright Laboratory profile
• INSPIRE-HEP profile
• Publications on arXiv

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