Does the W mass reconstruction survive QCD effects?

In the hadronic decay mode of a pair of W bosons, $\text{e}+\text{e}- \to \text{W}+ \text{W}- \to \text{q}_1 \overline{\text{q}}_2 \text{q}_3 \overline{\text{q}}_4$, QCD interference effects can mix up the two colour singlets $\text{q}_1 \overline{\text{q}}_2$ and $\text{q}_3 \overline{\text{q}}_4$, i.e. produce hadrons that cannot be uniquely assigned to either of W$+$ and W$-$. We show that interference is negligible for energetic perturbative gluon emission, and develop models to help us to estimate the non-perturbative effects. The total contribution to the systematic error on the W mass reconstruction may be as large as 40 MeV.