Power Corrections to Event Shape Distributions

We estimate the effects of non-perturbative physics on the differential distributions of infrared- and collinear-safe $e^+e^-$ event shape variables, by extending the notion of an infrared-regular effective strong coupling, which accounts for the non-perturbative corrections to the mean values of several shape variables, to their distributions. This leads to $1/Q$ power corrections over a range of values of the shape variables considered, where $Q$ is the centre-of-mass energy. In the case of the thrust variable, the leading correction is simply a shift of the distribution, by an amount proportional to $1/Q$. We show that this gives an excellent description of the data throughout a wide range of $T$ and $Q$.