On power corrections to event shapes

Abstract

Recent work on the theme of power corrections in perturbative QCD is briefly reviewed, with an emphasis on event shapes in e+ e- annihilation. The factorization of soft gluon effects is the main tool: it leads to resummation, and thus highlights the limitations of perturbation theory, pointing to nonperturbative corrections whose size can be estimated. Power corrections can be resummed into shape functions, for which QCD--based models are available. Theoretical progress is closing in on the nonperturbative frontier.