Sean Fleming, University of Arizona
Top Jets and Precision Measurements of the Top Quark Mass
November 6, 2007

I will consider the top mass dependence of top-antitop quark pairs
produced at large energy in electron-positron annihilation. This
process provides an extremely interesting warm-up to calculations of
precision top observables at the LHC. The process considered is
characterized by well separated scales: the center-of-mass energy, the
top mass, the top width, and the confinement scale. I demonstrate how
soft collinear effective theory and an interesting new formulation of
heavy-quark effective theory can be used to disentangle physics from
each of these scales. Furthermore the effective field theory (EFT)
calculation makes evident a number of subtleties that arise in
calculations of precision observables in an hadronic environment.
Fortunately, nearly all of the issues can be address in a systematic
fashion in an EFT framework. I will discuss each of the issues that
arises and give a final result for the differential cross section. The
conclusion is that the observable considered can provide a measurement
of the top quark mass with precision better than 100 MeV.