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

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 $t\bar t$ events to the pole mass extracted from top-meson samples simulated with Pythia 8.3. Our results are in agreement with the expectation of an uncertainty about $200$-$300$ MeV, hence of the order of $\Lambda_{\rm QCD}$.