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I read this question about mass being light moving in another dimension. I got a somewhat similar idea. Can't mass be generated by massless particles in a bound state? Which would mean that massless spin 1/2 particles find themselves in a bound state. They could form massive quarks and leptons. Of course the interaction has to be huge. But I see no fundamental difficulty. Massless spin 1/2 particles are described by Weyl spinors and gauge fields can be constructed. A kind of color force but much stronger.
All particles would move at the speed of light, and the masses of matter families explained. It could even be that there are equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Could it be?

Qmechanic
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MatterGauge
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1 Answers1

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I got a somewhat similar idea. Can't mass be generated by massless particles in a bound state? Which would mean that massless spin 1/2 particles find themselves in a bound state. They could form massive quarks and leptons. Of course the interaction has to be huge. But I see no fundamental difficulty.

Yes. Most of the mass of the proton and neutron (which means most of your mass) doesn't come from the mass of the quarks, but the binding energy of the quarks due to the strong force.

"Confinement" is the phenomenon by which we don't observe free quarks and gluons; the strong interactions mean that quarks and gluons always appear in bound states without a net color charge.

In fact, one of the Millennium Prize Problems is to show that Yang-Mills theory has a "mass gap." Perturbatively, Yang-Mills theory only has massless particles. But due to interactions between the gluons, massive bound states ("glueballs") form.

Massless spin 1/2 particles are described by Weyl spinors and gauge fields can be constructed. A kind of color force but much stronger.

There's no need to have a different force, the strong (color) force does exactly what you describe above.

All particles would move at the speed of light,

You have to be careful here -- free particles without mass travel at the speed of light, but the bound states with mass do not. Because of confinement, you don't expect to ever actually see free particles in QCD.

and the masses of matter families explained.

Confinement explains the mass of matter particles in the sense that you could compute the mass of the proton from first principles assuming you already know the mass of the quarks (see, eg, https://arxiv.org/abs/0906.3599). However it doesn't explain the masses of leptons and quarks due to the Higgs mechanism.

It could even be that there are equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Could it be?

This would contradict the observed matter-antimatter asymmetry in our Universe. But matter-antimatter asymmetry is a separate issue from confinement.

Andrew
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