What is mass according to the standard model?

[joegibs]

All particles get their mass from the higgs field. But how? According to the standard model what is "mass" and how do particles get it?

 

[Nugatory]

All particles get their mass from the higgs field. But how?

No. https://today.duke.edu/2012/11/higgsmisconceptions

According to the standard model what is "mass"

What do you find when you google for "what is mass?"

 

[LeandroMdO]

No. https://today.duke.edu/2012/11/higgsmisconceptions
What do you find when you google for "what is mass?"

"Misconception: The Higgs particle gives other particles mass.

Correction: The masses of fundamental particles come from interactions with the Higgs field. "

I fail to see how this is a meaningful "correction" apart from the added precision of specifying fundamental particles. Other than that it's obviously just semantics---in particle physics the words "particle" and "field" are often synonymous. This would be more understandable if the role of the Higgs vev had been explained, but it wasn't. A few sentences later the author adds

In the math that physicists use to understand the Higgs boson and field, there is a piece of an equation that they interpret as the existence of a Higgs boson, which they see as a point-like particle resulting from the Higgs field "curling in" on itself, like a knot in a spider's web.

which is clearly nonsense.

Physicists can't interpret the Higgs boson itself to be giving anything mass, but by interacting with other particles, they can argue that the Higgs field is giving resistance to the particles' motion, thereby giving them mass.

But the Higgs doesn't "resist motion" whatsoever. If it did, it'd violate Lorentz invariance. What's worse, massless particles have some form of inertia too: a photon that impinges on a mirror will transfer about twice its momentum to the mirror, etc.

The mass of quarks accounts for only one percent of the mass of a proton or neutron. The other 99 percent of the mass of observable matter comes from the energy that binds protons' and neutrons' constituent quarks together.

First of all, even defining what is meant by the mass of a quark is somewhat ambiguous because free quarks don't exist. It's correct that what is called "current" mass comes from the Higgs mechanism, but the "constituent" mass, which is the mass the quark has in the environment of the nucleon, is often discussed as well. It's not really fruitful to say that constituent mass is about binding energy, as the author implies, because stable objects have a smaller mass than the sum of the mass of the constituents! I understand that chiral symmetry breaking is even harder to explain to laypeople than the Higgs mechanism, but it's best to say something vague e.g. "it comes from the strong interaction" than writing something misleading.

Scientists believe this unseen, or dark matter, comprises more than 80 percent of the matter of the universe, but it doesn't interact strongly enough with anything to allow its direct observation. Yet, because it has significant mass, "it must interact with the Higgs field and that's another key point," Kruse says.

? There's no reason why something that has mass "must" interact with the Higgs field. Dark matter could be in an wholly dark sector, forever undetectable, and strictly speaking we have no right to expect otherwise.

Correction: The Higgs field generates the Higgs boson.

Another "correction" that doesn't help much. The text below it is a bit better but there's no useful sense in which a particle is "generated" by the field. What is meant by "particle", as always, depends on context, but where applicable we typically mean something like number eigenstates or some related observable of the Higgs field.

Correction: The Higgs field isn't a medium; it's a field of energy.

Depending on how precise you want to be, it is largely a matter of taste whether you're willing to call the Higgs field a "medium". However, only science fiction has "energy fields". Physics does not. Energy is just a number that we know doesn't change under the vast majority of physical processes.

So, in short, I don't think this article is particularly useful at eliminating popular misconceptions about the Higgs mechanism, and in fact it seems to add some new ones.

 

[mfb]

I fail to see how this is a meaningful "correction" apart from the added precision of specifying fundamental particles.

Neutrinos could have a different origin of mass. The Higgs boson itself has an important different contribution to its mass.

The article is not without issues, but I think it is better than what you often see in the news.

 

[LeandroMdO]

Neutrinos could have a different origin of mass. The Higgs boson itself has an important different contribution to its mass.

Yes, but the article didn't say that.

 

[ChrisVer]

if we want to play with semantics, the Higgs field's vev is responsible for the bare masses of particles (those that appear in the Lagrangian before renormalization)... the mass of a particle is a product of:
1. its bare mass
2. its self-interactions.
right?

 

[LeandroMdO]

if we want to play with semantics, the Higgs field's vev is responsible for the bare masses of particles (those that appear in the Lagrangian before renormalization)... the mass of a particle is a product of:
1. its bare mass
2. its self-interactions.
right?

Renormalization adds to a theory essentially whatever terms aren't prohibited by some symmetry. "Pure" quadratic interactions (mass terms) are prohibited by symmetry for most particles in the standard model. Mass terms for gauge bosons are forbidden by gauge invariance, and mass terms for fermions (neutrinos possibly excepted because nobody knows about neutrino masses) are forbidden because the left and right handed components (which get mixed by a mass term) transform according to different representations of the gauge group. There are still radiative corrections to masses though, and they can be calculated with diagrams that include the Higgs.