THE DIPOLE FORMALISM FOR THE CALCULATION OF QCD JET CROSS-SECTIONS ATNEXT-TO-LEADING ORDER

In order to make quantitative predictions for jet cross sections in pe rturbative QCD, it is essential to calculate them to next-to-leading a ccuracy. This has traditionally been an extremely laborious process. U sing a new formalism, imaginatively called the dipole formalism, we ar e able to construct a completely general algorithm for next-to-leading order calculations of arbitrary jet quantities in arbitrary processes . In this paper we present the basic ideas behind the algorithm and il lustrate them with a simple example.