Speaker
Description
Atomic nuclei lie at the core of everything we can see; and at the first level of approximation, their atomic weights are simply the sum of the masses of all the neutrons and protons (nucleons) they contain. Each nucleon has a mass mN ≈ 1 GeV, i.e. approximately 2000-times the electron mass. The Higgs boson - discovered at the large hadron collider in 2012 - produces the latter, but what generates the masses of the neutron and proton? This is a pivotal question. The answer is widely supposed to lie within quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the strong-interaction piece of the Standard Model. Yet, it is far from obvious. In fact, removing Higgs-boson couplings into QCD, one arrives at a scale invariant theory, which, classically, can't support any masses at all. This presentation will sketch forty years of developments in theory that suggest a solution to the puzzle and highlight an array of experiments that can validate the picture.
| Scientific topic | Fundamental interactions |
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