Each proton and neutron is composed of a triplet of quarks tightly bound together by gluons, the carriers of the strong nuclear force. And here's where it gets really weird. If you added up the masses of the three quarks that comprise each proton or neutron, you would only end up with around 1 percent of the total mass.
That's right. The total mass of all the fundamental parts of you electrons and quarks is just a laughably tiny part of your weight. Instead, most of the blame for tipping the scales is the energy of the interactions between your parts. Those gluons holding the protons and neutrons together are massless, but the very fact that they're doing their job — that is, gluing — gives rise to a binding energy.
Hence, most of your mass is really the binding energy of your protons and neutrons. And none of that has anything to do with the Higgs boson. But the impressive-sounding statements about the fundamental connection between the Higgs and mass aren't all subatomic smoke and mirrors. The Higgs does play a small role here: It's the explanation for the mass of your parts, the electrons and quarks themselves.
Even though they aren't very heavy, they're not entirely massless, and they can thank the Higgs for that. And the nature of that mass-making interaction? Often, the Higgs field is likened to a rich and creamy soup, or maybe a dense and heavy fog, or even a vat of thick and goopy honey. When the mass fell to its present value, it caused a related variable to plunge past zero, switching on the Higgs field, a molasseslike entity that gives mass to the particles that move through it, such as electrons and quarks.
Massive quarks in turn interacted with the axion field, creating ridges in the metaphoric hill that its energy had been rolling down. The axion field got stuck. And so did the Higgs mass. In what Sundrum called a radical break from past models, the new one shows how the modern-day mass hierarchy might have been sculpted by the birth of the cosmos. Dimopoulos remarked on the striking minimalism of the model, which employs mostly pre-established ideas.
It took very clever young people to realize that. Recently, the Axion Dark Matter eXperiment at the University of Washington in Seattle began looking for the rare conversions of dark matter axions into light inside strong magnetic fields. For example, in order for the axion field to have gotten stuck on the ridges created by the quarks rather than rolling past them, cosmic inflation must have progressed much more slowly than most cosmologists have assumed.
It might eventually be possible to oscillate an axion field, for example, to see whether this affects the masses of nearby elementary particles, by way of the Higgs mass. These tests of the proposal will not happen for many years. And realistically, several experts said, it faces long odds. So many clever proposals have failed over the years that many physicists are reflexively skeptical. Still, the intriguing new model is delivering a timely dose of optimism. Scientific terms can be confusing.
DOE Explains offers straightforward explanations of key words and concepts in fundamental science. Higgs Boson Facts The Higgs boson gets its mass just like other particles—from its own interactions with the Higgs field. The Higgs boson Elementary particles gain their mass from a fundamental field associated with the Higgs boson.
The Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism In the s, physicists realised that there are very close ties between two of the four fundamental forces — the weak force and the electromagnetic force. The top event in the CMS experiment shows a decay into two photons dashed yellow lines and green towers. The Higgs boson explained How do the elementary particles get their mass? The Higgs boson: What makes it special? Feature article. The Higgs discovery explained. YouTube video series.
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