A study of event-shape observables in proton-antiproton collisions at √s=1.96 TeV is presented. The data for this analysis were recorded by the CDF II Detector at the Tevatron Collider. The variables studied are the transverse thrust and thrust minor, both defined in the plane perpendicular to the beam direction. The observables are measured using energies from unclustered calorimeter cells. In addition to studies of the differential distributions, we present the dependence of event-shape mean values on the leading-jet transverse energy. Data are compared with pythia Tune A and to resummed parton-level predictions that were matched to fixed-order results at next-to-leading-order (NLO) accuracy (NLO+NLL). Predictions from pythia Tune A agree fairly well with the data. However, the underlying event contributes significantly to these observables, making it difficult to make direct comparisons to the NLO+NLL predictions, which do not account for the underlying event. To overcome this difficulty, we introduce a new observable, a weighted difference of the mean values of the thrust and thrust minor, which is less sensitive to the underlying event, allowing for a comparison with NLO+NLL. Both pythia Tune A and the NLO+NLL calculations agree well within the 20% theoretical uncertainty with the data for this observable, indicating that perturbative QCD successfully describes shapes of the hadronic final states.

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and National Science Foundation; the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare; the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology of Japan; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada; the National Science Council of the Republic of China; the Swiss National Science Foundation; the A. P. Sloan Foundation; the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, Germany; the World Class University Program, the National Research Foundation of Korea; the Science and Technology Facilities Council and the Royal Society, UK; the Institut National de Physique Nucleaire et Physique des Particules/CNRS; the Russian Foundation for Basic Research; the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, and Programa Consolider-Ingenio 2010, Spain; the Slovak R&D Agency; and the Academy of Finland.

13 páginas, 1o figuras, 2 tablas.-- PACS numbers: 13.87.-a, 12.38.Qk.-- CDF Collaboration: et al.

Peer reviewed