Paper
Measurement of alpha_s(M_Z^2) from Hadronic Event Observables at the Z^0 Resonance
Authors
Abe, Abt, Ahn, Akagi, Ash, Aston, Bacchetta, Baird, Baltay, Band, Barakat, Baranko, Bardon, Barklow, Bazarko, Ben-David, Benvenuti, Bienz, Bilei, Bisello, Blaylock, Bogart, Bolton, Bower, Brau, Breidenbach, Bugg, Burke, Burnett, Burrows, Busza, Calcaterra, Caldwell, Calloway, Camanzi, Carpinelli, Cassell, Castaldi, Castro, Cavalli-Sforza, Church, Cohn, Coller, Cook, Cotton, Cowan, Coyne, d’Oliveira, Damerell, Dasu, De Sangro R, De Simone P, Dell'Orso, Dima, Du, Dubois, Eisenstein, Elia, Falciai, Fan, Fero, Frey, Furuno, Gillman
Abstract
The strong coupling alpha_s(M_Z^2) has been measured using hadronic decays of Z^0 bosons collected by the SLD experiment at SLAC. The data were compared with QCD predictions both at fixed order, O(alpha_s^2), and including resummed analytic formulae based on the next-to-leading logarithm approximation. In this comprehensive analysis we studied event shapes, jet rates, particle correlations, and angular energy flow, and checked the consistency between alpha_s(M_Z^2) values extracted from these different measures. Combining all results we obtain alpha_s(M_Z^2) = 0.1200 \pm 0.0025(exp.) \pm 0.0078(theor.), where the dominant uncertainty is from uncalculated higher order contributions.