Topology of three-jet events in p»p collisions at s=1.8 TeV

The production and event topology of three-jet events produced in pp collisions at √s=1.8 TeV have been studied with the Collider Detector at Fermilab at the Tevatron Collider. The distributions of the three-jet angular variables (ψ* and cosθ*) and of the variables describing the energy sharing between jets (x 3 and x 4 ) are found to agree well with tree-level QCD calculations. These distributions are predicted to have different shapes for different initial-state subprocesses (quark-antiquark, quark-gluon, and gluon-gluon). The data are consistent with the small expected contribution from quark-antiquark initial states, in agreement with theoretical expectations