In this Report, QCD results obtained from a study of hadronic event structure in high energy e^+e^- interactions with the L3 detector are presented. The operation of the LEP collider at many different collision energies from 91 GeV to 209 GeV offers a unique opportunity to test QCD by measuring the energy dependence of different observables. The main results concern the measurement of the strong coupling constant, \alpha_s, from hadronic event shapes and the study of effects of soft gluon coherence through charged particle multiplicity and momentum distributions.
Differential distributions for event thrust.
The energy dependence of the relative production rate of three-jet events is studied in hadronic e + e − annihilation events at center of mass energies between 22 and 46.7 GeV. Three-jet events are defined by a jet finding algorithm which is closely related to the definition of resolvable jets used in O( α s 2 ) perturbative QCD calculations, where the relative production rate of three-jet events is roughly proportional to the size of the strong coupling strength. The production rates of three-jet events in the data decrease significantly with increasing centre of mass energy. The experimental rates, which are independent of fragmentation model calculations, can be directly compared to theoretically calculated jet production rates and are in good agreement with the QCD expectations of a running coupling strength. The hypothesis of an energy independent coupling constant can be excluded with a significance of four standard derivations.