Higgs and Lattice calculations

[edpell]

My understanding is that the folks who do particle mass calculations using the formalism of a lattice get results that fit measured values well without using a Higgs field. Is this correct? If so, do we have any use for and/or reason to believe in the Higgs field/particle?

 

[Vanadium 50]

What the lattice people do has little to nothing to do with the Higgs mechanism.

 

[ansgar]

Mass comes from 2 places:

1) Higgs mechanism giving mass to fermions and the gauge bosons of electroweak interaction (W and Z)

2) The strong interaction, the gluon and quark content of hadron give rise to mass due to E = mc^2, the bidning energy manifests itself in the mass of objects!

c.f. nulei, where the mass is LOWER than the sum of the mass of the constitutent nucleons.

Now this is called the "mass gap", even if the quarks were massless (i.e. no higgs at all) hadrons will have non-zero mass!

 

[edpell]

quoting from Frank Wilczek's book "The Lightness of Being" page 201
" Then there's the Higgs particle, sometimes said to be "the origin of mass" or even "the God particle." ... In brief, the Higgs field (which is more fundamental than the particle) enables us to implement our vision of a universal cosmic superconductor and embodies the beautiful concept of spontaneous symmetry breaking. These ideas are deep, strange, glorious, and very probably true. But they don't explain the origin of mass--let alone the origin of God. Although it's accurate to say that the Higgs field allows us to reconcile the existence of certain kinds of mass with details of how the weak interactions work, that's a far cry from explaining the origin of mass or why different masses have the values they do."

in appendix B Wilczek goes on to explain how canceling of long range weak force by the "cosmic superconductor" works leading to massive W and Z.

He goes on with (page 214) "By contrast we don't have a reliable theory for what the Grid superflows are made from. None of the fields we've observed to date has the right properties. Theoretically, it's possible that the job is done by a single new field, the so-called Higgs field, and its attendant Higgs particle It's also possible that several fields are involved. In the theories featuring SUSY, which figure heavily in our ideas for achieving unification, there are at least two fields contributing to the superflows, and at least five particles associated with them."

So my question: Is the only purpose of a Higgs field the cancellation of long range weak forces?