The production rates for 2-, 3-, 4- and 5-jet hadronic final states have been measured with the DELPHI detector at the e + e − storage ring LEP at centre of mass energies around 91.5 GeV. Fully corrected data are compared to O(α 2 s ) QCD matrix element calculations and the QCD scale parameter Λ MS is determined for different parametrizations of the renormalization scale ω 2 . Including all uncertainties our result is α s ( M 2 Z )=0.114±0.003[stat.]±0.004[syst.]±0.012[theor.].
Corrected jet rates.
Second systematic error is theoretical.
Differential three-jet cross sections have been measured in e + e − -annihilation at an average CM energy of 33.8 GeV and were compared to first- and second-order predictions of QCD and of a QED-like abelian vector theory. QCD provides a good description of the observed distributions. The inclusion of second-order effects reduced the observed quark-gluon coupling strength by about 20% to α S = 0.16 ± 0.015 (stat.) ± 0.03 (syst.). The abelian vector theory is found to be incompatible with the data.
FIRST ORDER QCD.
SECOND ORDER QCD.