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I haven't got a whole satisfying answer to this question. I think that matter can exist without charge but it can't exist without mass. Am I correct?

So this fact may be answered by asking about the truth of the statement "Charge can't exist without mass" or by the following question:-

Which is more fundamental property of matter charge or mass?

The question Massless charged particles, proposed as a duplicate, has a different premise than this question because this question addresses two problems

  1. Can charge exist without mass?
  2. As the title suggests, which is more basic for matter: charge or mass?
Shreyansh Pathak
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1 Answers1

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We don't know.

Neutrinos are matter particles, in the sense that, like electrons, they are fermions and obey the exclusion principle. It is known that there are (at least) three different neutrino masses, but it's an open question whether the least-massive neutrino has, like the photon, a mass of exactly zero. That would be a "matter" particle with neither electric charge nor mass.

Note that the electric charge quantum number is only one of many properties of the fields whose excitations we observe as particles. There are also flavor quantum numbers, the color charge which is responsible for the strong force, and some others which are more challenging to describe briefly. Thinking of the electric charge as "special" is a conceit which is useful from our macroscopic perspective because the electric charge generates long-range forces --- and also because the total electric charge of a closed system is exactly conserved, rather than approximately conserved as (e.g.) the flavor quantum numbers are.

If you take the perspective that dividing the standard model into "matter" and "not-matter" is also only a useful macroscopic conceit, then the gluons fit your description of a field with a totally-conserved charge quantum number but zero mass.

rob
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