Multijet production in neutral current deep inelastic scattering at HERA and determination of alpha(s)

Multijet production rates in neutral current deep inelastic scattering have been measured in the range of exchanged boson virtualities 10 5 GeV and -1 < η LAB jet < 2.5. Next-to-leading-order QCD calculations describe the data well. The value of the strong coupling constant α s (M Z ), determined from the ratio of the trijet to dijet cross sections, is α s (M Z ) = 0.1179 ± 0.0013 (stat.) -0.0046 -0.0028 (exp.) -0.0046 +0.0064 (th.). © Springer-Verlag / Societa Italiana di Fisica 2005.