Not exactly. For some reason, STCF and CEPC were put as direct competitors for this five year budget - despite very different scale of those projects. And I bet the CEPC decision was influenced by the fact that CERN has not made a final decision regarding the FCC. STCF has no competition.

???

For what? The slashed PhD positions are those that used to be paid for by the federal grants provided to do research in STEM and other fields

We have projectors in the walls and use laptops at the tables

Could be — glueballs are the primary example. But not in this case. If there is a new boson whose mass is twice the mass of a top quarks and the quantum numbers of a top pair, then, according to Quantum Mechanics, they would mix.

Actually, Barry had a nice paper doing that for the QED case. Maybe one can generalize it to trabe and QCD. Do you want to talk about it?

I was sure someone actually looked into that… but maybe not. But it’s not just the coupling - at threshold the Higgs exchange generates a point interaction - so one gets additional 1/m_H^2 suppression. One can resum those, just like for the deuteron (delta-function potential).

I thought about the Higgs exchange… but it should not be stronger than the usual QCD Sommerfeld enhancement. IMHO, the 1/v effect for non-relativistic top quarks should produce the feature that they see… what do you think?

Why do you call the threshold feature a bound state?

Yes, this is unfortunate. If the current trend continues, the European scientists would have no will to travel to the US, while US scientists would have no means/grants to travel to Europe…