Electron-Positron Annihilation into Four Jets at Next-to-Leading Order inαs

Abstract

We calculate the rate for ${e}^{+}{e}^{\ensuremath{-}}$ annihilation into four jets at next-to-leading order in perturbative QCD, but omitting terms that are suppressed by one or more powers of ${1/N}_{c}^{2}$, where ${N}_{c}$ is the number of colors. The $O({\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{s}^{3})$ corrections depend strongly on the jet resolution parameter ${y}_{\mathrm{cut}}$ and on the clustering and recombination schemes, and they substantially improve the agreement between theory and data.