Local charge compensation from colour pre-confinement as a key to the dynamics of hadronization

If, as is often accepted, the colour-singlet, 'pre-confined', perturbative clusters are the primary units of hadronization, then the electric charge is necessarily compensated locally at the scale of the typical cluster mass. As a result, the minijet electric charge is suppressed at scales that are greater than the cluster mass. We hence argue, and demonstrate by means of Monte Carlo simulations using HERWIG, that the scale at which charge compensation is violated is close to the mass of the clusters involved in hadronization, and its measurement would provide a clue to resolving the nature of the dynamics. We repeat the calculation using PYTHIA and find that the numbers produced by the two generators are similar. The cluster mass distribution is sensitive to soft emission that is considered unresolved in the parton shower phase. We discuss how the description of the splitting of large clusters in terms of unresolved emission modifies the algorithm of HERWIG, and relate the findings to the yet unknown underlying nonperturbative mechanism. In particular, we propose a form of αS that follows from a power-enhanced beta function, and discuss how this αS that governs unresolved emission may be related to power corrections. Our findings are in agreement with experimental data. (author)