A study of three-jet events at the CERN\(\bar pp\) collider

The UA2 experiment, running at the CERN SPS\(\bar pp\) Collider, has performed a study of events containing three hard jets in the final state. The angular distributions of the three jets show evidence for gluon bremsstrahlung, in good agreement with a QCD model to leading order in the strong coupling constant αs. The yield of three-jet events relative to that of two-jet events provides a measure of the strong coupling constant: ;3K3/K2=0.23±0.01±0.04, whereK2 andK3 represent the contributions arising from higher order corrections in α3 to the two- and three-jet exclusive cross-sections. A detailed discussion of the systematic and theoretical uncertainties is given.