Interpreting the top quark mass using simulations of top-flavoured mesons

Abstract

Active work is being done on the issue of the interpretation of the top quark mass in terms of well-defined theoretical definitions. This work considers this issue by simulating fictitious heavy-light top-flavoured mesons with a fixed mass in Pythia 8.3. Within Heavy Quark Effective Theory, the mass of the top mesons can be related to the pole mass of the top quark. By fitting final-state observables in top pair production at current hadron and future lepton colliders, we extract a negative mass difference between the input Pythia mass for the top quark and the pole mass of around $240$-$330$ MeV, consistent with $\mathcal{O}({\Lambda }_{\mathrm{QCD}})$.

arXiv comment9 pages, 8 figures. Proceedings of QCD@Work 2026