Properties of hadronic decays of the Z boson

The decays of the Z{sup 0} boson to quarks and subsequently to hadrons were first directly observed in 1989 with the Mark II detector. This report studies the general properties of the hadronic events in the initial data sample recorded at center-of-mass energies near the Z{sup 0} resonance (91.2 GeV). The preliminary chapters introduce the theoretical framework and the apparatus. A brief review is given of some features of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) that are relevant to the study. Two QCD-based models that are used to help correct the data distributions for detector effects and also for comparisons with the corrected distributions are described. For each of the detector systems used in the analysis, the design, operation and performance is discussed. The next chapter describes the event selection which is designed to provide a sample of well-measured hadronic events. The following three chapters contain the measured data distributions. The QCD-based models with parameters tuned at E{sub cm} = 29 GeV describe the 91 GeV data distributions well. Each of these chapters also shows the variation of the observables as the center-of-mass energy changes. 43 figs., 12 tabs.