Revealing the Origin of Mass through Studies of Hadron Spectra and Structure

Abstract

The Higgs boson is responsible for roughly 1% of the visible mass in the Universe. Obviously, therefore, Nature has another, very effective way of generating mass. In working toward identifying the mechanism, contemporary strong interaction theory has arrived at a body of basic predictions, viz. the emergence of a nonzero gluon mass-scale, a process-independent effective charge, and dressed-quarks with constituent-like masses. These three phenomena - the pillars of emergent hadron mass (EHM) - explain the origin of the vast bulk of visible mass in the Universe. Their expressions in hadron observables are manifold. This contribution highlights a few; namely, some of the roles of EHM in building the meson spectrum, producing the leading-twist pion distribution amplitude, and moulding hadron charge and mass distributions.