Charged multiplicities in Z decays into u, d and s quarks

G Abbiendi, Georgios Anagnostou, Ian Bloodworth, Paul Bright-Thomas, David Charlton, Christopher Hawkes, Roger Homer, Martin Jimack, Predrag Jovanovic, Alun Lloyd, Thomas McMahon, Stephen O'Neale, Scott Talbot, Miriam Watson, Peter Watkins, Alan Watson, Nigel Watson, John Wilson

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2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

About 4.4 million hadronic decays of Z bosons, recorded by the OPAL detector at LEP at a centre-of-mass energy of around roots = 91.2 GeV, are used to determine the mean charged particle multiplicities for the three light quark flavours. Events from primary u, d, and s quarks are tagged by selecting characteristic particles which carry a large fraction of the beam energy. The charged particle multiplicities are measured in the hemispheres opposite to these particles. An unfolding procedure is applied to obtain these multiplicities for each primary light quark flavour. This yields [n(u)] = 17.77 +/- 0.51(-1.20)(+0.86), [n(d)] = 21.44 +/- 0.63(-1.17)(+1.46), [n(s)] = 20.02 +/- 0.13(-0.37)(+0.39), where statistical and systematic errors are given. The results for [n(u)] and [n(d)] are almost fully statistically anti-correlated. Within the errors the result is consistent with the flavour independence of the strong interaction for the particle multiplicities in events from the light up, down, and strange quarks.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)257-268
Number of pages12
JournalEuropean Physical Journal C
Volume19
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Feb 2001

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