DETERMINATION OF ALPHA-S FROM THE SCALING VIOLATION IN THE FRAGMENTATION FUNCTIONS IN E+E- ANNIHILATION

A determination of the hadronic fragmentation functions of the Z0 boson is presented from a study of the inclusive hadron production with the DELPHI detector at LEP. These fragmentation functions were compared with the ones at lower energies, thus covering data in a large kinematic range: 196 less-than-or-equal-to Q2 less-than-or-equal-to 8312 GeV2 and x (= p(h)/E(beam)) > 0.08. A large scaling violation was observed, which was used to extract the strong coupling constant in second order QCD: alpha(s)(M(Z)) = 0.118 +/- 0.005. The corresponding QCD scale for five quark flavours is: LAMBDA(MS)(5)BAR = 230 +/- 60 MeV.