Introduction

In these notes, I discuss some attempts to describe the development of hadron final states in annihilation events using QCD. A few features (barely visible at available energies) of this development are amenable to a precise and formal analysis in QCD by means of perturbation theory. For the most part, however, existing theoretical methods are quite inadequate: one must therefore simply try to identify the dominant physical phenomena to be expected from QCD, and make estimates of their effects, with the hope that results so obtained will provide a good approximation to eventual exact calculations. In so far as such estimates are necessary, precise quantitative tests of QCD are precluded. On the other hand, if QCD is assumed correct, then existing experimental data may be used to investigate its behavior in regions not yet explored by theoretical means.

These notes make brief excursions into many topics: some further explanation and details may be found in [1,2,3].

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