Top-quark mass interpretation from simulation of top-flavoured mesons

A

bstract

The interpretation of the top-quark mass measurements in terms of well-known field theory definitions has been the topic of a long-standing discussion. In this paper we reconsider this issue and simulate fictitious top-flavoured mesons, whose mass can be related to any top mass definition, such as the pole mass, by means of Heavy Quark Effective Theory. We explore final-state observables for top-pair production in e ⁺ e ⁻ and hadron collisions, and relate the top mass in standard

events to the pole mass extracted from top-meson samples simulated with P 8.3. Our results are in agreement with the expectation of an uncertainty about 200–300 MeV, hence of the order of Λ _QCD .