NLO QCD corrections to five-jet production at LEP and the extraction of α s(M Z)

Journal article

The highest exclusive jet multiplicity studied at LEP experiments is five. In this paper we compute the next-to-leading order QCD corrections to e +e - annihilation to five jets, essentially closing the (pure) perturbative QCD studies of exclusive jetty final states at LEP. We compare fixed-order perturbative results with ALEPH data. We estimate hadronization corrections to five-jet observables using the event generator SHERPA, which employs the CKKW procedure to combine a reliable perturbative treatment of highmultiplicity jet final states with parton showers. We show that a competitive value of the strong coupling constant α s(M Z) = 0.1156 -0.0034+0.0041 can be extracted from the distribution of the five-jet resolution parameter and the five-jet rate at LEP1 and LEP2.

Authors: Frederix, R; Frixione, S; Melnikov, K; Zanderighi, G

• Journal: Journal of High Energy Physics
• Volume: 2010
• Issue: 11
• Publication date: 2010-01-01
• DOI: 10.1007/JHEP11(2010)050
• EISSN: 1029-8479
• ISSN: 1126-6708
• Language: English
• Keywords: LEP HERA and SLC Physics; NLO Computations; Jets; QCD