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When a proton is smashed apart in an accelerator, quarks and gluons fly out. But you never see them free: almost immediately they stick together into new particles, like droplets of mercury merging into spheres. This process is called hadronization, and it gets in the way of precisely measuring the force that glues quarks together — the strong interaction.

The authors propose a general recipe for accounting for this sticking across several event types. Previously, each type required its own corrections, and in the messiest data regions, they were simply thrown out. Now they show that if the direction of the most energetic jet is determined event by event, the energy dependence of the effect doesn't break the overall picture — instead, it gives an extra handle. It's like gaining a second hand to hold a slippery object.

This means we can use data where hadronization is strongest, and those are the most sensitive points for pinning down the strong coupling constant. Tests on computer simulations confirm that a unified approach works better than a patchwork of separate methods.