TESTING GLUON SELF-INTERACTIONS IN 3-JET EVENTS AT HADRON COLLIDERS

The effective operator tr(G3)is the only CP-even dimension-6 gluonic o perator that cannot be related to four-quark operators. A peculiar pro perty of this operator is that it does not contribute to two-jet produ ction at hadron colliders, at the level of one operator insertion and leading order in alpha(s); therefore we study its effects on three-jet events. To calculate the helicity amplitudes induced by this operator we make extensive use of collinear factorization. We propose several ways of detecting the tr(G3) signal, one of which exploits its non-tri vial behavior under azimuthal rotations of two almost collinear jets.