Electron-Positron Annihilation into Four Jets at Next-to-Leading Order in ${\alpha }_s$

Abstract

We calculate the rate for $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ annihilation into four jets at next-to-leading order in perturbative QCD, but omitting terms that are suppressed by one or more powers of $1/{\text{Nc}}^2$, where $\text{Nc}$ is the number of colors. The $\text{cO}({\alpha }_s^3)$ corrections depend strongly on the jet resolution parameter $\text{ycut}$ and on the clustering and recombination schemes, and they substantially improve the agreement between theory and data.

Comments: LaTex, 7 pages with 3 encapsulated figures. Minor changes and references added