Unveiling the Strong Interaction origin of Baryon Masses with Lattice QCD

TL;DR

This paper uses advanced lattice QCD simulations to accurately predict baryon masses and reveals two fundamental mass generation mechanisms involving Higgs contributions and gluon quantum anomaly.

Contribution

First-principles lattice QCD calculations uncover the relative roles of Higgs and gluon effects in baryon mass formation.

Findings

Predicted baryon masses within 1% of experimental values.

Identified flavor-dependent Higgs contribution enhancement.

Quantified flavor-insensitive gluon quantum anomaly contribution.

Abstract

Both the Higgs mechanism and strong interactions contribute to the masses of visible matter, yet how the six Higgs-generated quark masses and uniform strong interaction strength determine the hundreds of hadron masses remains unclear. Additionally, the role of massless, flavor-neutral gluons on hadron mass formation is central to the unresolved Millennium Prize problem on the mass gap in Yang-Mills theory. Addressing these questions requires advanced simulations on state-of-the-art supercomputers using Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), which offers a rigorous, non-perturbative definition of QCD solvable numerically. Here we present first-principles lattice QCD calculations using comprehensive gauge ensembles that accurately predict ground state spin-1/2 and spin-3/2 baryon masses with light, strange, and charm quarks within 1\% of experimental values. At the \(\overline{\mathrm{MS}}\) 2 GeV scale, our results unveil two fundamental mass generation mechanisms for those baryon masses in QCD: 1) the flavor-dependent enhancement of Higgs contributions, 4-8 for light, 2-3 for strange, and 1.2-1.3 for charm quarks; and 2) the flavor-insensitive contribution 0.8-1.2 GeV from gluon quantum anomaly. This breakthrough significantly advances our comprehension of strong interaction dynamics and the genesis of visible matter's mass.