The Origin of Proton Mass from J/$\mathrm{\Psi }$ Photo-production Data

Abstract

The trace of the stress tensor characterizes the transformation of a theory under rescaling. In quantum chromodynamics (QCD), this trace contains contributions from the bare masses of the quarks and also from a purely quantum effect, called the QCD trace anomaly. It affects all masses in the theory. We present an estimation of the QCD trace anomaly from the near-threshold J/$\mathrm{\Psi }$ photo-production data of the GlueX experiment, at JLab. We apply a vector meson dominance model to describe the photo-production of J/$\mathrm{\Psi }$ and a running strong coupling which includes the nonperturbative effects in the low ${\mu }^2$ region. Despite the large uncertainty, we find that the experimental data favors a small value of the trace anomaly parameter $b=0.07\pm 0.17$. We report the resulting proton mass decompositions at ${\mu }^2=0.41$ GeV${}^2$ and ${\mu }^2=4$ GeV${}^2$.

6 pages, 4 figures