Revealing the Origin of Mass through Studies of Hadron Spectra and Structure

¹ School of Physics, Nanjing University, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210093, China
² Institute for Nonperturbative Physics, Nanjing University, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210093, China

^* e-mail: cdroberts@nju.edu.cn

Published online: 16 February 2024

Abstract

The Higgs boson is responsible for roughly 1% of the visible mass in the Universe. Obviously, therefore, Nature has another, very effective way of generating mass. In working toward identifying the mechanism, contempo rary strong interaction theory has arrived at a body of basic predictions, viz. the emergence of a nonzero gluon mass-scale, a process-independent effective charge, and dressed-quarks with constituent-like masses. These three phenom ena – the pillars of emergent hadron mass (EHM) – explain the origin of the vast bulk of visible mass in the Universe. Their expressions in hadron observables are manifold. This contribution highlights a few; namely, some of the roles of EHM in building the meson spectrum, producing the leading-twist pion distribution amplitude, and moulding hadron charge and mass distributions.