Measurement of eta production in two and three-jet events from hadronic Z decays at LEP

The inclusive production of \eta mesons has been studied using 1.6 million hadronic Z decays collected with the L3 detector. The \eta multiplicity per event, the multiplicity for two-jet and three-jet events separately, and the multiplicity in each jet have been measured and compared with the predictions of different Monte Carlo programs. The momentum spectra of \eta in each jet have also been measured. We observe that the measured \eta momentum spectrum in quark-enriched jets agrees well with the Monte Carlo prediction while in gluon-enriched jets it is harder than that predicted by the Monte Carlo models.