Four-jet production in $e^+e^-$ annihilation at next-to-leading order

Abstract

We present a partonic Monte Carlo event generator that can be used for calculating the group independent kinematical functions of any infrared safe four-jet observable at NLO accuracy. As an example, we calculate the differential distribution of the $\Pi_1$ and $\Pi_4$ Fox-Wolfram moments. We find large K factors (K $>$ 2). The effect of the radiative correction is to increase the overall normalization, but not to reduce the renormalization scale dependence significantly.