Top quark production near threshold at NLC

In this talk we discuss the process e+e- -> t t-bar near threshold. In particular we discuss a quark mass definition which is a generalization of the static PS mass. The new definition allows us to calculate recoil corrections to the static PS mass. Using this result we calculate the cross section of e+e- -> t t-bar near threshold at NNLO accuracy adopting three alternative approaches, namely (1) fixing the pole mass, (2) fixing the PS mass, and (3) fixing the new mass which we call the PS-bar mass. We demonstrate that perturbative predictions for the cross section become much more stable if we use the PS or the PS-bar mass for the calculations. A careful analysis suggests that the top quark mass can be extracted from a threshold scan at NLC with an accuracy of about 100-200 MeV.