Measurement of αs from hadronic event observables at the Z0 resonance

The strong coupling αs has been measured using hadronic decays of Z0 bosons collected by the SLD experiment at SLAC. The data were compared with QCD predictions both at fixed order, O(αs2), and including resummed analytic formulae based on the leading and next-to-leading logarithm approximation. The authors studied event shapes, jet rates, particle correlations, and energy fraction and checked the consistency between αs extracted from these different measures. Combining all results they obtain αs(MZ02) = 0.120 ± 0.003(exp.) ± 0.009(theor.), where the dominant uncertainty in αs is from uncalculated higher order contributions