Z° bosons have been produced by collisions of longitudinally polarized electrons with unpolarized positrons at the SLAC Linear Collider and their decays have been recorded by the SLD experiment. We present preliminary measurements of the properties of the resulting Z° decays into multi-hadronic final states. We find good agreement with the predictions of perturbative QCD and fragmentation models.

Z[degrees] bosons have been produced by collisions of longitudinally polarized electrons with unpolarized positrons at the SLAC Linear Collider and their decays have been recorded by the SLD experiment. We present preliminary measurements of the properties of the resulting Z[degrees] decays into multi-hadronic final states. We find good agreement with the predictions of perturbative QCD and fragmentation models.

We use the Mark II detector to study Z decays into bottom quark-anti-quark pairs, leading to the production of bottom hadrons. The Z bosons are formed in ee− annihilation at the SLC at center-of-mass energies between 89 and 93 GeV. We identify events containing semileptonic decays of bottom hadrons by detecting isolated leptons, i.e leptons with high transverse momenta relative to the nearest hadronic jet. Using isolated electrons and muons, we measure the B-hadron semileptonic branching ratio times the fraction of hadronic Z decays which contain bottom hadrons, B(B 2!Xl[nu]){center dot}[Gamma](Z 2!b{bar b})/[Gamma](Z 2!had) = 0.025 {sub -0.009}{sup +0.100} {plus minus} 0.005, where we have listed the statistical errors followed by the systematic error. Assuming B(B 2!X(ell)[nu]) = 11% {plus minus} 1%, we measure [Gamma](Z 2!b{bar b})/[Gamma](Z 2!had) = 0.23 {sub -0.09}{sup +0.11}, in good agreement with the standard-model prediction of 0.22. We find [Gamma](Z 2!b{bar b}) = 0.40 {sub -0.16}{sup +0.19} GeV. 83 refs., 34 figs., 19 tabs.

We have studied hadronic final states produced in the decays of Z bosons using the Mark II detector at SLC. We have measured the distributions of global shape parameters, inclusive charged particle distributions, charge particle multiplicity and jet multiplicity. The results are compared to predictions of QCD-based models optimized at the PEP energy. The data and models agree within the present statistical precision. We have also investigated a new method to determine the QCD scale parameter [Lambda]{sub {ovr MS}} using differential jet multiplicity. 9 refs., 5 figs.