Quantum Scaling in Energy Correlators Beyond the Confinement Transition

We study the QCD scaling behavior of the small-angle Energy-Energy Correlator (EEC), focusing on the transition between its perturbative pre-confinement and non-perturbative post-confinement regimes. Applying the light-ray Operator Product Expansion (OPE), we develop a formalism that describes the scaling of the EEC with the input energy Q in the transition and the post-confinement region, where the latter quantum scaling is determined by the J=5 DGLAP anomalous dimension. A key result of our work is a novel connection between the light-ray OPE and the dihadron fragmentation function (DFF), where we show that the non-perturbative OPE coefficients correspond to moments of the DFF. This finding establishes a new paradigm for studying hadronization. Our theoretical predictions are validated against Monte Carlo simulations for both e^+e^- and pp collisions, showing excellent agreement. The potential role of the quantum scaling in the precision determination of αₛ is also discussed.