A study of the electric charge distributions of quark and gluon jets in hadronic Z0 decays

Abstract A sample of three-jet events containing a lepton with high momentum and transverse momentum is selected from hadronic decays of the Z 0 . The presence of the lepton indicates the semi-leptonic decay of a bottom quark and allows us, in combination with energy ordering of the jets, to distinguish between quark and gluon jets. The sign of the lepton charge is used to identify jets originating from positively and negatively charged quarks, for the jets with the lepton and for the high energy jets. Defining the jet charge by summing the charge of the particles assigned to a jet, it is observed that the mean jet charge of the quark jets is incompatible with zero and that the sign of the jet charge corresponds to that expected from the charge of the primary quark. In contrast, the mean charge of the gluon jets is consistent with zero.