A toy model for the quark pole mass

Abstract: We study the pole mass for a heavy quark probe in the Gross--Neveu model, at the first non-trivial order in the $1/N$ expansion. We show that this mass suffers from a perturbative renormalon ambiguity structurally similar to the one in QCD. The exact large $N$ solution leads however to an explicit expression for the pole mass which can be decoded as a trans-series, and we find that non-perturbative corrections cure the renormalon ambiguity. We also calculate the self-energy of the heavy quark beyond perturbation theory by using the OPE method with condensates, and show that the results are in agreement with the large $N$ solution. The non-perturbative corrections to the pole mass turn out to be determined to a large extent by the condensate corrections to the self-energy. However, there is a class of corrections that has to be reorganized due to on-shell effects and cannot be obtained from the conventional condensate expansion. We discuss possible implications of this toy model for QCD.