Experimental study of rapidity gaps in gluon jets

Gluon jets are selected from hadronic Z/sup 0/ decay events produced in e/sup +/e/sup -/ annihilations, collected with the OPAL detector at LEP. A subsample of these jets is identified which exhibit a large gap in the rapidity distribution of particles within the jet. These jets are observed to demonstrate a high degree of sensitivity to the presence of color reconnection, i.e. higher order QCD processes affecting the underlying color structure. We test two QCD Monte Carlo programs which implement color reconnection: one in the Ariadne Monte Carlo and the other by Rathsman in the Pythia Monte Carlo. We find these models can describe our gluon jet measurements only if very large values are used for the cutoff parameters which serve to terminate the parton showers, and conclude that color reconnection as implemented in these models is disfavored. Further, we use our data on gluon jets with a rapidity gap to search for glueball-like objects in the leading part of those jets. We do not find any clear evidence for the production of these objects. (9 refs)