Colour interference and confinement effects in W-pair production

In the reactione ⁺ e ^– W ⁺ W ^– ( ) ( ) we expect that normally the colour singlet systems ( ) and ( ) hadronize independently into two hadron chains or strings. However also the pairs ( ) and ( ) form colour singlets with probability 1/N _c ² =1/9. This probability could be further enhanced by gluon exchange. We therefore expect that the hadronization can give recoupled colour strings between these quark-antiquark pairs with some small probability, and a study of this effect will give interesting information about the vacuum structure. In this paper we discuss a possible experimental signal for recoupled events and show that such events can be identified also when the effect of gluon emission before the recoupling is taken into account.