“Mass is an emergent phenomenon rather than an intrinsic property of fundamental entities.”

mass terms for the W and Z weak gauge bosons as well as for all fermions (quarks and leptons) can only appear as emergent quantities after the spontaneous breaking of the EW symmetry … The masses of all fermions are also a consequence of EWSB since the Higgs doublet is postulated to couple to the fermions through Yukawa interactions in a way consistent with all the gauge symmetries of the SM.

Thus, if the Standard Model is truly a part of the theory of Nature, then the proton mass is an emergent feature of QCD; and emergent hadron mass (EHM) must provide the basic link between theory and observation. … Equation (7) is the cleanest expression of EHM in Nature, being truly a manifestation of mass emerging from nothing: infinitely many massless gluon partons fuse together so that, for all intents and purposes, they behave as coherent quasiparticle fields with a long-wavelength mass, which is almost half that of the proton.

The source of all these things can be traced to emergent mass, which might itself be QCD’s self-stabilising mechanism. … The natural scale for nuclear physics (strong interactions) is characterised by the proton mass: mp≈1GeV≈2000me, (1) wheremeis the electron mass, i.e.,mp=1.783×10−27kg. In the SM,meis correctly attributed to the Higgs boson, but what is the cause of the prodigious enhancement required to producemp? … The appearance and size of the natural scale for nuclear physics (mp≈1GeV) and the confinement of gluons and quarks are emergent phenomena. They are not apparent in the QCD Lagrangian, yet they determine the character of QCD’s spectrum, the structure of bound states and so forth.

Contemporary theory suggests that mp emerges as a consequence of gluon self-interactions, which are a defining characteristic of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of strong interactions in the Standard Model. … Its mass appears as a corollary of other, more basic emergent phenomena latent in the QCD Lagrangian, e.g. generation of nuclear-size gluon and quark mass-scales, and a unique effective charge that may describe QCD interactions at all accessible momentum scales.

We now see Newtonian mass as an emergent property. … Most of the mass of standard matter, by far, arises dynamically, from back-reaction of the color gluon fields of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Additional quantitatively small, though physically crucial, contributions come from the intrinsic masses of elementary quanta (electrons and quarks).

Gluons are massless at the level of the fundamental Lagrangian that describes pure Yang-Mills theories or the gauge sector of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) [1], and the use of symmetry-preserving regularization schemes, such as dimensional regularization [2], enforces their masslessness at any finite order in perturbation theory. Nonetheless, mounting evidence indicates [3–7] that the nonperturbative gluon self-interactions give rise to a dynamical gluon mass, or mass gap, as originally asserted four decades ago in a series of seminal works [8–13] and subsequently explored in a variety of contexts [14–22].

This is truly mass from nothing: an interacting theory, written in terms of massless gluon partons, produces massive dressed gluon fields.

According to our current understanding, all particles were massless just after the Big Bang. As the Universe cooled and the temperature fell below a critical value, an invisible field called the ‘Higgs field’ was formed; this field prevails throughout the cosmos. Particles such as the W and Z bosons acquire mass through their interaction with this field – the more intensely they interact, the heavier they become.

There are two mass generating mechanisms in the standard model of particle physics (SM). One is related to the Higgs boson and fairly well understood. The other is embedded in quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the SM’s strong interaction piece; and although responsible for emergence of the roughly 1 GeV mass scale that characterises the proton and hence all observable matter, the source and impacts of this emergent hadronic mass (EHM) remain puzzling.

The problem of mass generation is first described, where it is shown that simply writing down mass terms manifestly breaks cherished symmetries. It is then shown that spontaneous symmetry breaking cures this problem.

We have some of our properties purely in virtue of the way we are. (Our mass is an example.)

The Higgs boson does not technically give other particles mass. More precisely, the particle is a quantized manifestation of a field (the Higgs field) that generates mass through its interaction with other particles.

The discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012 confirmed what we particle physicists had long suspected: that there is a field permeating the cosmos that generates the masses of elementary particles. … This notion lies at the heart of what the late British physicist Peter Higgs, namesake of the Higgs field, and his competitors pointed out in the 1960s: that one field can stiffen other fields, thereby permitting their ripples to vibrate in place with a resonant frequency, and thus giving their particles mass.

The Higgs boson is the fundamental particle associated with the Higgs field, a field that gives mass to other fundamental particles such as electrons and quarks. … Fundamental particles in our universe acquire mass through their interactions with the Higgs field.

We now understand that inertial mass is better described as an emergent quality rather than an intrinsic property of matter, given that several fundamental particles, such as electrons, positrons and quarks, owe their inertia to a coupling with the Higgs field, while other composite particles, such as neutrons and protons, acquire inertia via the dynamical back reaction of accelerated quarks, which radiate gluons to conserve momentum

We present a pedagogical overview of the nonperturbative mechanism that endows gluons with a dynamical mass.

Newtonian mechanics posited mass as a primary quality of matter, incapable of further elucidation. We now see Newtonian mass as an emergent property.

In this context, it is shown how the notion of inertial mass has an emergent character, directly linked with the sub-quantum degrees of freedom of the associated Hamilton-Randers system.

Newtonian mechanics posited mass as a primary quality of matter, incapable of further elucidation. We now see Newtonian mass as an emergent property.

As it later turned out, other elementary particles also acquire masses by interacting with the Higgs field, giving rise to the particle properties we observe today.

A more gradual shift in its interpretation, however, occurred already in the early-to-mid-1950s when renormalization techniques were transferred to solid-state and nuclear physics and helped establish the notion of effective or quasi-particles, emergent entities that are not to be found in the original, microscopic description of the theory.

Newtonian mechanics posited mass as a primary quality of matter, incapable of further elucidation. We now see Newtonian mass as an emergent property. … In classical mechanics Mass is an irreducible, defining property of matter. In modern physics there is no equivalent fundamental concept. Mass in the original, Newtonian sense appears as an approximate, emergent property of matter.

The existence of bare mass as an intrinsic property of the elementary particle is thus denied, and its numerical value is irrelevant, with its fine-tuning being outside the debate.

The Weinberg–Witten theorem forbids a fundamental massless spin-2 particle, yet the energy–momentum tensor of quantum field theory carries an unsuppressed spin-2 channel in its vacuum fluctuation spectrum. Any massless spin-2 excitation in this channel can only be a composite collective mode. … Should such a pole appear, it cannot correspond to an elementary particle. The Weinberg–Witten theorem thus presents a sharp theoretical choice. … If gravity can emerge from the statistical behavior of energy–momentum tensor fluctuation spectral functions, it would be an effective manifestation of vacuum fluctuation collective effects, as opposed to an independent fundamental force in nature.

The Lagrangian masses of the light quarks, a few to 10 MeV for the up and down quarks, and around 100 MeV for the strange quark, should be contrasted with what we might expect from the quark model – illustrated in fig. 4. Naively, looking at the baryons or heavy mesons, we expect the quark masses to be of order a third the proton mass or about 300 MeV.

In Newtonian physics, inertial mass is construed as an intrinsic property of an object that measures the extent to which an object resists changes to its state of motion. … The inertial mass in Newtonian physics (and even the gravitational mass) is routinely interpreted as an intrinsic property of an object.

The first category corresponds to approaches in which the fundamental degrees of freedom are not taken to be the spacetime geometry itself, but other sort of microscopic degrees of freedom.

Thus, if the Standard Model is truly a part of the theory of Nature, then the proton mass is an emergent feature of QCD; and emergent hadron mass (EHM) must provide the basic link between theory and observation.

The physical degrees of freedom are emergent hadrons (pro tons, mesons ...) as bound states of quarks and gluons. … Emergent properties include the proton’s mass and spin. The proton’s mass is generated from the confinement potential.

Furthermore, the masses and sizes of nuclei, protons and neutrons cannot simply be obtained by “adding up” smaller degrees of freedom; they are rather dictated by the coupling constant of the strong force, which below a certain energy scale, ΛQCD, becomes so large that the force between two particles becomes approximately independent of their distance, inducing confinement.

The evidence I have presented in this paper suggests that the Standard Model of Particle Physics (SMPP) has been built on top of the particular gravitational background that we experience on Earth, and that the numbers we put into the model are (at least in some cases) taken from this background, rather than being universal constants.

In the Standard Model of particle physics, the Higgs mechanism is essential to explain the generation mechanism of the property " mass" for gauge bosons. … Without the Higgs mechanism, all bosons(one of the two classes of particles, the other being fermions) would be considered massless, but measurements show that the W+, W−, and Z0 bosons actually have relatively large masses of around 80 GeV/c2.

In the Standard Model of particle physics, the Higgs mechanism is essential to explain the generation mechanism of the property " mass" for gauge bosons. … Without the Higgs mechanism, all bosons(one of the two classes of particles, the other being fermions) would be considered massless, but measurements show that the W+, W−, and Z0 bosons actually have relatively large masses of around 80 GeV/c2. … In the Standard Model, at temperatures high enough that electroweak symmetry is unbroken, all elementary particles are massless.

This article argues that the structure of physical quantities like mass reduces to facts about the role that mass plays in the laws of nature.

The book concludes with a presentation of recently proposed global and local dynamical theories of the origin and nature of mass.

It is argued that the problem of space quantization should be considered in close connection with the problem of mass quantization.

Recent theoretical progress indicates that spacetime and gravity emerge together from the entanglement structure of an underlying microscopic theory.

The idea that gravity and spacetime originate from some underlying microscopic reality in which they do not exist is a widely held belief in, for example, the string theory commu nity.

There is sufficient amount of internal evidence in the nature of gravitational theories to indicate that gravity is an emergent phenomenon like, e.g, elasticity.

It is possible that both the classical description of spacetime and the rules of quantum field theory emerge from a more-fundamental structure of physical law.

The origin of the mass dependence, which provides the dynamical relation between energy and momentum, is in the two-point Schwinger function.

Entropic gravity, also known as emergent gravity, is a theory in modern physics that describes gravity as an entropic force—a force with macro-scale homogeneity but which is subject to quantum-level disorder—and not a fundamental interaction.

These features of our Universe are examples of what may be called emergent phenomena within the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics: low-level rules producing high-level phenomena with apparently remarkable complexity.

The mass of a particle used to be considered a fundamental and intrinsic property of the particle; on the same level as other properties such as charge, spin, chirality/helicity. Due to the Higgs mechanism this has changed. The mass is now considered a property that is acquired as the result of interaction with the Higgs field.