Quark-mass effects for jet production in e^+ e^- collisions at the next-to-leading order: results and applications

Abstract

We present a detailed description of our calculation of next-to-leading order QCD corrections to heavy quark production in e^+ e^- collisions including mass effects. In particular, we study the observables $R_3^{b\ql}$ and $D_2^{b\ql}$ in the E, EM, JADE and DURHAM jet-clustering algorithms and show how one can use these observables to obtain $m_b(m_Z)$ from data at the $Z$ peak.