Study of the structure of hadronic events and determination of αS at s = 130 GeV and 136 GeV

We present a study of the structure of hadronic events recorded by the L3 detector at center-of-mass energies of 130 and 136 GeV. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 5 pb−1 collected during the high energy run of 1995. The shapes of the event shape distributions and the energy dependence of their mean values are well reproduced by QCD models. From a comparison of the data with resummed O(αs2) QCD calculations, we determine the strong coupling constant to be αs(133 GeV) = 0.107 ± 0.005(exp) ± 0.006(theor).