I have thought of a slightly different way of explaining the
mechanism that gives protons most of their mass. I saw it explained recently in
a youtube video; the explanation was that it is the vacuum energy of the gluon
field that gives rise to most of the proton mass due to the equivalence of mass
and energy (the Higgs mechanism contributes slightly). This explanation seems
strange to me for a simple reason: Photons have energy contained in their field
and yet they have no mass since they move at light speed.
The explanation runs
contrary to how mass normally presents itself in the standard model as an
interaction with the Higgs field. Firstly I need to expound how I think about
the Higgs mechanism since it bears almost exact resemblance to my explanation.
The Higgs potential has a non-zero vacuum expectation value and it is this fact
that is used to explain mass; the Higgs potential can also be used to tell us
about how the Higgs boson interacts with itself. The Higgs boson also interacts
with matter and can change the momentum of a particle it interacts with and
this occurs frequently enough for the particle to be kept from travelling a
great distance unimpeded. The mean free path of the particle is small and so it
bounces back and forth over this small distance and this makes it look like it
isn’t moving at the speed of light. Between interactions with the Higgs,
however, it is moving at the speed of light. Higgs bosons “bounce” off each
other and this ensures that we have a
frothing soup of Higgs bosons flying in
all directions which is why particles can’t get very far before they interact
with a Higgs.
The parallel that
gluons have with the Higgs is that they too can “bounce” off one another. The
mechanism I described for the Higgs interaction applies now to quarks and
gluons meaning that gluons slow down quarks like Higgs bosons slow down other
particles (and quarks).
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