The top quark mass from weak boson masses without neutral currents

We present a detailed study of the indirect determination of the top quark mass from the muon lifetime calculated in the one-loop-corrected electroweak model. We use on-mass-shell renormalization, a scheme which optimally exploits the improved determinations of the weak boson masses in collider experiments. Strong interaction ambiguities, such as those associated with structure functions in calculations based on neutral current data, are essentially avoided. Limits on the top mass using present experimental errors on MW and MZ are already competitive with those obtained from traditional neutral current analyses. We manage to parametrize our analysis in terms of a few parameters, making possible its immediate application to future experiments improving on W and Z mass measurements. (orig.)