We have measured the multiplicity of charm quark pairs arising from gluon splitting in a sample of about 3.5 million hadronic Z 0 decays. By selecting a 3-jet event topology and tagging charmed hadrons in the lowest energy jet using leptons, we established a signature of heavy quark pair production from gluons. The average number of gluons splitting into a c c pair per hadronic event was measured to be n g→c c =(2.27±0.28±0.41) × 10 −2 .
Axis error includes +- 8.4/8.4 contribution (Total generator error for the electron channel due to the uncertainties in parameters of Peterson model of fragmentation, LAMBDA_QCD, ALPHA_S, Lund fragmentation parameters and lepton decay model).