Non-perturbative QCD analysis of near-to-planar three-jet events

Abstract

We present the analysis of the 1/Q-suppressed non-perturbative (NP) contribution to the cumulative out-of-event-plane momentum distribution in e+e- annihilation in the near-to-planar three-jet region. It complements our previous study of the perturbative (PT) distributions resummed to single logarithmic accuracy. Due to inter-jet soft gluon radiation, the NP contributions (as well as the PT distributions) are sensitive to the geometry (the angles between jets) and the colour structure of the underlying hard process (topology of the three-prong parton antenna). The results and techniques presented here could be extended to other multi-jet processes and, in particular, to hadron-hadron collisions.