The Origin Of Matter's Mass

I can't believe it. I'm reporting on Ethan Siegel's article two days in a row! The last one yesterday was a doozy, wasn't it? :)

This one is a bit different and interesting. The first part of the article describes our understanding of where mass comes from for matter. I want to highlight this because it clarify one very important misconception that many people have, especially the general public. After all the brouhaha surrounding the Higgs and its discovery, a lot of people seem to think that all the masses of every particle and entity can be explained using the Higgs. This is clearly false as stated in the article.

Yet if we take a look at the proton (made of two up and one down quark) and the neutron (made of one up and two down quarks), a puzzle emerges. The three quarks within a proton or neutron, even when you add them all up, comprise less than 0.2% of the known masses of these composite particles. The gluons themselves are massless, while the electrons are less than 0.06% of a proton's mass. The whole of matter, somehow, weighs much, much more than the sum of its parts.

The Higgs may be responsible for the rest mass of these fundamental constituents of matter, but the whole of a single atom is nearly 100 times heavier than the sum of everything known to make it up. The reason has to do with a force that's very counterintuitive to us: the strong nuclear force. Instead of one type of charge (like gravity, which is always attractive) or two types (the "+" and "-" charges of electromagnetism), the strong force has three color charges (red, green and blue), where the sum of all three charges is colorless.

So while we may use the Higgs to point to the origin of  mass in, say, leptons, for hadrons/partons, this is not sufficient. The strong force itself contributes a significant amount to the origin of mass for these particles. The so-called "God Particles" are not that godly, because it can't do and explain everything.

The other interesting part of the article is that he included a "live blog" of the talk by Phiala Shanahan at occurred yesterday at the Perimeter Institute, related to this topic. So you may want to read through the transcript and see if you get anything new.

Zz.