We have determined the strong coupling $\as$ from a comprehensive study of energy-energy correlations ($EEC$) and their asymmetry ($AEEC$) in hadronic decays of $Z~0$ bosons collected by the SLD experiment at SLAC. The data were compared with all four available predictions of QCD calculated up to $\Oa2$ in perturbation theory, and also with a resummed calculation matched to all four of these calculations. We find large discrepancies between $\as$ values extracted from the different $\Oa2$ calculations. We also find a large renormalization scale ambiguity in $\as$ determined from the $EEC$ using the $\Oa2$ calculations; this ambiguity is reduced in the case of the $AEEC$, and is very small when the matched calculations are used. Averaging over all calculations, and over the $EEC$ and $AEEC$ results, we obtain $\asz=0.124~{+0.003}_{-0.004} (exp.) \pm 0.009 (theory).$
Statistical errors only.
Statistical errors only.
ALPHAS from the EEC O(ALPHAS**2) measurement.
Average charged multiplicities have been measured separately in $b$, $c$ and light quark ($u,d,s$) events from $Z~0$ decays measured in the SLD experiment. Impact parameters of charged tracks were used to select enriched samples of $b$ and light quark events, and reconstructed charmed mesons were used to select $c$ quark events. We measured the charged multiplicities: $\bar{n}_{uds} = 20.21 \pm 0.10 (\rm{stat.})\pm 0.22(\rm{syst.})$, $\bar{n}_{c} = 21.28 \pm 0.46(\rm{stat.}) ~{+0.41}_{-0.36}(\rm{syst.})$ $\bar{n}_{b} = 23.14 \pm 0.10(\rm{stat.}) ~{+0.38}_{-0.37}(\rm{syst.})$, from which we derived the differences between the total average charged multiplicities of $c$ or $b$ quark events and light quark events: $\Delta \bar{n}_c = 1.07 \pm 0.47(\rm{stat.})~{+0.36}_{-0.30}(\rm{syst.})$ and $\Delta \bar{n}_b = 2.93 \pm 0.14(\rm{stat.})~{+0.30}_{-0.29}(\rm{syst.})$. We compared these measurements with those at lower center-of-mass energies and with perturbative QCD predictions. These combined results are in agreement with the QCD expectations and disfavor the hypothesis of flavor-independent fragmentation.
Average charge multiplicity in B-tagged events.
Average charge multiplicity in C-tagged events.
Average charge multiplicity in light quark (uds) events.
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