TTP96-28 Nonfactorizable QCD and Electroweak Corrections to the Hadronic Z Boson Decay Rate

We present an analysis of two-loop mixed QCD and electroweak corrections to the decay of the Z boson into light quarks. We find that the naive factorization of QCD and electroweak corrections does not describe correctly the two-loop effects. The nonfactorizable corrections shift the width of the Z boson by approximately -0.55(3) MeV and increase the central value of the strong coupling constant determined at LEP by 0.001.