Extending the Kinetic Mass to Higher Orders in $1/m_Q$
Abstract
Currently, the kinetic mass is defined in terms of the pole mass and operators at order , which are known to NLO accuracy in . At the same time, the Heavy Quark Expansion (HQE) for inclusive semileptonic decays is known up to and including terms of order . Therefore, it is desirable to extend the definition of the kinetic mass to higher orders in . The original kinetic mass is based on the hadron-mass formula in Heavy Quark Effective Theory (HQET). However, the HQE is formulated in terms of matrix elements defined in full QCD to avoid the appearance of non-local matrix elements. To avoid this, we develop a definition of the kinetic mass rooted in full QCD. Starting from the hadron-mass formula derived from the energy-momentum tensor of full QCD, we define a relation between a general mass and the pole mass. Using a simple cut-off scheme, we compute a generalized kinetic mass at one loop to all powers of , which reproduces the well-known results for the kinetic mass up to . Our approach opens the road to a consistent use of the kinetic mass at higher-orders in the heavy quark expansion.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2602.21139,
title = {Extending the Kinetic Mass to Higher Orders in $1/m_Q$},
author = {Thomas Mannel and Ilija S. Milutin and Rens Verkade and K. Keri Vos},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.21139},
year = {2026}
}