Elimination of threshold singularities in the relation between on-shell and pole widths

In a previous communication by two of us [B. A. Kniehl and A. Sirlin, Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 1373 (1998)], the gauge-dependent deviations of the on-shell mass and total decay width from their gauge-independent pole counterparts were investigated at leading order for the Higgs boson of the standard model. In the case of the widths, the deviation was found to diverge at unphysical thresholds, mH=2√(ξV)mV (V=W,Z), in the Rξ gauge. In this Brief Report, we demonstrate that these unphysical threshold singularities are properly eliminated if a recently proposed definition of wave-function renormalization for unstable particles is invoked