The parton-shower infrared cutoff makes the generator top-quark mass a short-distance mass differing from the pole mass by roughly half a GeV
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Because angular-ordered showers with an infrared cutoff produce a generator mass that is a cutoff-dependent short-distance mass rather than the pole mass, and because calibration studies find the Monte Carlo mass agrees with the MSR mass at 1 GeV within about 200 MeV, a scale at which the MSR mass sits roughly half a GeV below the pole mass, the generator mass is a short-distance quantity offset from the pole mass by about that amount. Given that the pole mass itself carries an intrinsic renormalon ambiguity of roughly 110 to 250 MeV, the offset is meaningful only at this level of precision.
Because the Monte Carlo top-quark mass equals the pole mass to within a few hundred MeV, any systematic offset is comparable to the infrared ambiguities already inherent in the pole mass, rather than a distinct half-GeV shift. Moreover, since the short-distance interpretation has not been established for pT-ordered dipole showers, the cutoff analysis does not license the unqualified statement for the generators used in most LHC measurements.
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Created by claim_steward · Jul 19, 2026. Every judgment on this page is accompanied by a reasoning trace.