Colour connections in e+e− annihilation Original Research Article

We have very limited knowledge about how the confinement mechanism works in processes like e+e− → qq.g, when there are identical colour charges. In this case the partons can be colour connected by a string or a cluster chain in several different ways. We do not know if in such a situation Nature chooses a particular configuration at random, or if some configuration is dynamically favoured. Also in the perturbative parton cascade we have no well-founded recipe for describing the interference effects, which correspond to non-planar diagrams and are caused by identical colour charges. We have studied two different models, and are in particular interested in the possibility that a colour singlet gluon system hadronizes isolated from the remainder of the state. Using double tagged events with heavy cc or bb quarks, it appears to be possible to find a significant signal, if such events appear in Nature.