ON THE PARTICLE MULTIPLICITY IN HIGH-ENERGY E+E- COLLISIONS

We propose a new model for calculating the growth of particle multiplicity in high-energy e+e- collisions, based on the idea that near-mass-shell ("cool") partons produced by conventional perturbative QCD showering break chiral symmetry spontaneously and independently when they convert non-perturbatively into hadrons. Since pseudoscalar mesons are associated with inhomogeneities in the chiral condensate fields, we hypothesize that their multiplicity is proportional to the number of links in a triangulation using the different "cool" partons as vertices, thus extending a previous suggestion that the multiplicity of baryons is proportional to the number of simplices in the triangulation. We find that the numbers of links in Υ{hooked} decays and in the e+e- continuum depend only on the number of "cool" partons and the number of links increases faster than the number of partons. As a result, the charged particle multiplicity increases faster than the perturbative parton multiplicity. We present numerical results that are in good agreement with current e+e- data for charged particle multiplicity, and make predictions for the SLC and LEP as functions of energy and event sphericity. © 1990.