| Abstract: | Three jet events arising from decays of the Z boson, collected by the DELPHI detector, were used to measure differences in quark and gluon fragmentation. Gluon jets were anti-tagged by identifying b quark jets. Unbiased quark jets came from events with two jets plus one photon. Quark and gluon jet properties in different energy ranges were compared for the first time within the same detector. Quark and gluon jets of nearly the same energy in symmetric three jet event topologies were also compared. Using three independent methods, the average value of the ratio of the mean charged multiplicities of gluon and quark jets is $$< r >=1.241 pm 0.015 (stat.)pm 0.025 (syst.).$$ Gluon jets are broader and produce fragments with a softer energy spectrum than quark jets of equivalent energy. The string effect has been observed in fully symmetric three jet events. The measured ratio Rγ of the charged particle flow in the qq? inter-jet region of the qq?g and qq?γ samples agrees with the perturbative QCD expectation. The dependence of the mean charged multiplicity on the hadronic center-of-mass energy was analysed in photon plus n-jet events. The value for αs(M Z) determined from these data using a QCD prediction with corrections at leading and next-to-leading order is $$←pha_s(M_Z)=0.116pm 0.003 (stat.)pm 03009 (syst.).$$ |
