A test of the flavor independence of strong interactions

The authors present a comparison of the strong couplings of b, c, and light (u, d, and s) quarks derived from multi-jet rates in flavor-tagged samples of hadronic Z(sup 0) decays recorded with the SLC Large Detector at the SLAC Linear Collider. By comparing the rates of 3-jet events in these three samples they have extracted (Preliminary) values of: alpha(sub s)(uds)/alpha(sub s)(all) = 0.96 +/- 0.03(stat.) +/- 0.04(syst.) +/- 0.02(theory), alpha(sub s)(c)/alpha(sub s)(all) = 1.16 +/- 0.11(stat.) +/- 0.10(syst.) +/- 0.07(theory), alpha(sub s)(b)/alpha(sub s)(all) = 0.98 +/- 0.04(stat.) +/- 0.08(syst.) +/- 0.02(theory).