Universal Nonperturbative Effects in Event Shapes from Soft-Collinear Effective Theory

Abstract

Two-jet event shape distributions, traditionally studied in the language of perturbative QCD, can be described naturally in soft-collinear effective theory. In this language, we demonstrate factorization of event shape distributions into perturbatively-calculable hard and jet functions and nonperturbative soft functions, and show how the latter contribute universal shifts to the mean values of various event shape distributions. Violations of universality in shifts of higher moments can give information on correlations of energy flow in soft radiation.