Next-to-leading order QCD jet production with parton showers and hadronization

We report on a method for matching the next-to-leading order calculation of QCD jet production in e{sup +}e{sup -} annihilation with a Monte Carlo parton shower event generator (MC) to produce realistic final states. The final result is accurate to next-to-leading order (NLO) for infrared-safe one-scale quantities, such as the Durham 3-jet fraction y{sub 3}, and agrees well with parton shower results for multiscale quantities, such as the jet mass distribution in 3-jet events. For our numerical results, the NLO calculation is matched to the event generator Pythia, though the method is more general. We compare one-scale and multiscale quantities from pure NLO, pure MC, and matched NLO-MC calculations.