Heavy quark mass determination from the quarkonium ground state energy: a pole mass approach

The heavy quark pole mass in perturbation theory suffers from a renormalon caused, inherent uncertainty of $O(\Lambda_{\rm QCD})$. This fundamental difficulty of determining the pole mass to an accuracy better than the inherent uncertainty can be overcome by direct resummation of the first infrared renormalon. We show how a properly defined pole mass as well as the $\bar {\rm MS}$ mass for the top and bottom quarks can be determined accurately from the $O(m\alpha_s^5)$ quarkonium ground state energy.