Measurement of Charge and the Sterman-Weinberg Criterion

For e⁺e^- annihilation, a quantity is constructed which contains information about the distribution of charges in the final states of the process but which, like other jet variables discussed extensively in the literature, is expected to be free of mass singularities. Unlike predictions of other variables, however, this perturbative result is not physically sensible. Confinement effects ruin the prediction, yet there is no indication of this in the form of infrared divergences in the calculation.