Model for experimental extraction of the charmed-quark mass(es).

Abstract

A simple charm-production model is presented which approximates the running of the charmed-quark mass by identifying the mass in the quark propagators with the bare and/or current mass arising from electroweak symmetry breakdown and identifying the mass in Dirac spinors with the QCD renormalized long-distance and/or constituent mass. The model offers the possibility of (i) understanding the differing charmed-quark mass values extracted from different experiments, (ii) determining the bare charmed-quark mass relevant to quark mass matrix and mixing angle studies, and (iii) determining the renormalized charmed-quark mass, which determines the charmed-quark threshold, which in turn sensitively affects the extraction of ${sin}^{2}{\ensuremath{\theta}}_{W}$. We point out that the threshold and forward angle production offer the best possibilities to test the model and extract meaningful charmed-quark masses. The model may also be used to extract $b$-quark masses.