HiggsbyHiggs MechanismMug

Higgsby fills all of space, quietly. I GIVE YOU MASS.

In 1964 François Englert and Robert Brout, and separately Peter Higgs, showed how a field filling space could give mass to particles that would otherwise have none. In the Standard Model that field has a constant value everywhere, v, about 246 GeV. The ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN found its particle, the Higgs boson, in 2012, and Englert and Higgs shared the 2013 Nobel Prize.

The equation on this mug is for fermions: quarks and charged leptons such as the electron. Each couples to the field with its own strength, the Yukawa coupling, and its mass is that coupling times v over root two. The electron's coupling is tiny, about three in a million. The top quark's is almost exactly one. The W and Z bosons get their masses from the same field but through their gauge couplings, a different formula.

Here is the catch in the line. Higgsby gives elementary particles their masses, but not most of yours. Protons and neutrons, which carry almost all the mass of ordinary matter, are far heavier than the quarks inside them. Nearly all of their mass comes from the energy of the strong force binding quarks and gluons together, as lattice calculations of quantum chromodynamics have confirmed. Most of the mass in you is that binding energy.

Higgsby never takes credit for more than he gives. He gives the electron its mass, and that is enough to make atoms the size they are.