$\alpha_s$ from soft parton-to-hadron fragmentation functions

The QCD coupling α s is extracted at approximate next-to-next-to-leading-order (NNLO ∗ ) accuracy from the energy evolution of the first two moments (multiplicity and mean) of the parton- to-hadron fragmentation functions at low fractional hadron momentum z. Comparisons of the experimental e + e − and DIS e ± p jet data to our NNLO ∗ +NNLL predictions, allow us to obtain α s (m 2 Z ) = 0.1205±0.0010 +0.0022 −0.0000 , in excellent agreement with the current world average.