Determination of the strong coupling constant from jet rates in deep inelastic scattering

Abstract Jet rates in deep inelastic electron proton scattering are studied with the H1 detector at HERA for momentum transfers squared between 10 and 4000 GeV 2 . It is shown that they can be quantitatively described by perturbative QCD in next to leading order making use of the parton densities of the proton and with the strong coupling constant α s as a free parameter. The measured value, α s ( M Z 2 ) = 0.123 ± 0.018, is in agreement both with determinations from e + e − annihilation at LEP using the same observable and with the world average.