Electron-Positron Annihilation into Four Jets at Next-to-Leading Order inαs

We calculate the rate for $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ annihilation into four jets at next-to-leading order in perturbative QCD, but omitting terms that are suppressed by one or more powers of ${1/N}_c^2$, where $N_c$ is the number of colors. The $O\left({\alpha }_s^3\right)$ corrections depend strongly on the jet resolution parameter $y_{\mathrm{cut}}$ and on the clustering and recombination schemes, and they substantially improve the agreement between theory and data.