Origin of the Proton Mass

Abstract

Atomic nuclei lie at the core of everything visible; and at the first level of approximation, their atomic weights are simply the sum of the masses of all the neutrons and protons (nucleons) they contain. Each nucleon has a mass $m_N\approx 1\mathrm{GeV}\approx 2000$-times the electron mass. The Higgs boson -- discovered at the large hadron collider in 2012, a decade ago -- produces the latter, but what generates the nucleon mass? This is a pivotal question. The answer is widely supposed to lie within quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the strong-interaction piece of the Standard Model. Yet, it is far from obvious. In fact, removing Higgs-boson couplings into QCD, one arrives at a scale invariant theory, which, classically, can't support any masses at all. This contribution sketches forty years of developments in QCD, which suggest a solution to the puzzle, and highlight some of the experiments that can validate the picture.

10 pages, 4 figures. Summary of a presentation at the 8th International Symposium on Symmetries in Subatomic Physics (SSP2022), Vienna, 2022 08/29 - 09/02