Ratios of multijet cross sections in pp̄ collisions at √s= 1.8 TeV

We report on a study of the ratio of inclusive three-jet to inclusive two-jet production cross sections as a function of total transverse energy in p ¯ p collisions at a center-of-mass energy √s=1.8 TeV, using data collected with the D0 detector during the 1992–1993 run of the Fermilab Tevatron Collider. The measurements are used to deduce preferred renormalization scales in perturbative O(α 3 s) QCD calculations in modeling soft-jet emission.