The mass of the proton has been solved. Free Technical Library News

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Proton mass solved

28.11.2018

Protons are made up of even smaller particles called quarks, so you might expect that simply adding up the masses of the quarks should give the mass of the proton. However, their sum is too small to explain the mass of the proton. And new, detailed calculations show that only 9 percent of the proton's energy comes from the mass of its constituent quarks. The rest of the proton's mass comes from complex processes that take place inside the particle.

Quarks get their masses from a process involving the Higgs boson, an elementary particle first discovered in 2012. But "quark masses are tiny," says study co-author and theoretical physicist Keh-Fei Liu of the University of Kentucky at Lexington. Therefore, they are not very important for explaining the mass of the proton.

Instead, much of the proton's mass is due to the complexities of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which explains the foaming of particles in the proton. Performing calculations with QCD is extremely difficult, so in order to theoretically study the properties of the proton, scientists rely on a method called lattice QCD, in which space and time are broken up into sections that contain quarks.

Using this technique, physicists have previously calculated the mass of the proton, but so far have not been able to explain why it is. Theoretical physicist Andre Walker-Load of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California said researchers have entered "a new era" in which lattice QCD can be used to better understand nuclear physics.

Liu and his colleagues found that in addition to the 9 percent of the mass of a proton that comes from quarks, 32 percent comes from the energy of quarks flying around inside the proton (if you remember Einstein's famous equation E = mc2, it is clear that energy and mass are two sides the same coin). The other constituents of the proton, massless particles called gluons that help hold quarks together, contribute another 36 percent of their mass through their energy.

The remaining 23 percent comes from quantum effects that occur when quarks and gluons interact in complex ways in a proton. These interactions cause QCD to ignore a principle called scale invariance. In scale invariant theories, the stretching or shrinking of space and time has nothing to do with the results of the theory. Massive particles provide the theory with scale, so when QCD defies scale invariance, protons also gain mass.

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