Studies of multiparticle production in hadronic Z{sup 0} decays

Hadronic decays of Z{sup 0} bosons produced in e{sup +}e{sup {minus}} annihilation are ideal for testing QCD. This thesis presents a measurement of the charged-particle multiplicity distribution and the first experimental study of the ratio of cumulant to factorial moments, using hadronic Z{sup 0} decays collected by the SLD experiment at SLAC. The author finds that this ratio, as a function of the moment-rank q, decreases sharply to a negative minimum at q = 5, which is followed by quasi-oscillations. These features are in qualitative agreement with expectations from higher-order perturbative QCD. The author also presents an analysis of the intermittency in rapidity phase space using the method of scaled factorial moments. It is found that both parton cascade and hard-gluon radiations contribute to the growth of the moments by studying the event-shape and jet-topology dependencies. All aspects of the data appear to be reproduced reasonably well by the QCD-based Monte Carlo model