Statistical and systematic treatment issues in top quark mass combinations

The past years have seen tremendous improvements in the precision of top quark mass measurements at hadron colliders. Since these measurements are mostly limited by systematic uncertainties, the achievable precision of a single measurement depends on developments in the experimental and theoretical understanding of top quark events. Complementing these efforts, a precision gain can also be obtained by a combination of measurements, exploiting their correlation. With ever increasing precision of single experiment top quark mass measurements, this approach becomes more and more promising, because the absolute precision gain of refined techniques in both theory and experiment tends to saturate. This requires a precise matching of uncertainty categories and a detailed evaluation of the correlations of observables. This article reviews the status and points out the challenges faced in the ATLAS and CMS LHC top quark mass combination effort.