IMPROVED QCD TREATMENT OF THE KNO PHENOMENON

It is shown that next-to-next-to-leading QCD effects due to a better account of energy conservation in parton cascades lead to peculiar ''preasymptotic'' behaviour of multiplicity fluctuations. For large x = n/[n] the KNO multiplicity distribution takes the form f (x) is-proportional-to exp(- [Dx]mu), where mu = (1 - gamma)-1 > 1 is related to the multiplicity anomalous dimension gamma. These effects, which are not present in single-inclusive particle distributions, are however bound to drastically affect particle correlations at present and foreseeable energies.