DOI 10.1007/s100520000406
Leading particle production in light flavour jets
The OPAL Collaboration
G. Abbiendi2 - et al.
2 Dipartimento di Fisica dell' Università di Bologna and INFN,
40126 Bologna, Italy
Received: 19 November 1999 / Published online: 8 May 2000 - © Springer-Verlag 2000
Abstract
The energy distribution and type of the particle with the highest momentum in
quark jets are determined for each of the five quark flavours making only
minimal model assumptions. The analysis is based on a large statistics sample
of hadronic 
decays collected with the OPAL detector at the LEP
collider. These results provide a basis for future studies of
light flavour production at other centre-of-mass energies. We use our results
to study the hadronisation mechanism in light flavour jets and compare the data
to the QCD models JETSET and HERWIG. Within the JETSET model we also directly
determine the suppression of strange quarks to be
by comparing the production of charged and neutral kaons in strange and non-strange light quark events. Finally we study the features of baryon production.
Copyright Società Italiana di Fisica, Springer-Verlag 2000
