Disentangling the Strong Interactions in Two-Jet Event Shapes

Event shapes characterize hadronic final states produced in e+ e- collisions. The two-jet kinematic endpoint of event shape distributions is particularly sensitive to the nonperturbative effects of hadronization. Soft-collinear effective theory provides the tools to factorize event shape distributions in the two-jet region into perturbatively-calculable and nonperturbative contributions. From the resulting factorization theorem we can deduce the extent to which these nonperturbative contributions are universal across different event shapes.