The Crazy Mass-Giving Mechanism of the Higgs Field Simplified

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REFERENCES:
Where 99% of mass comes from: https://youtu.be/KnbrRhkJCRk
ElectroWeak Unification: https://youtu.be/u05VK0pSc7I
Symmetry Breaking: https://youtu.be/yzqLHiA0uFI

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CHAPTERS:
0:00 Sources of mass
2:33 Blinkist Free Trial
3:51 Particles are excitations in Fields
6:09 How Mass comes from interaction with Higgs
10:42 Why do some particles interact and others don't?
11:31 How our universe would not exist without Higgs

SUMMARY:
How does the Higgs give mass to particles? How do elementary particles gain mass? All mass is Energy. 99% of the mass of an atom is contained in the binding energy within the nucleus. But about 1% of your mass is contained in the mass of the subatomic particles that make up the atoms, electrons and quarks.

How do these subatomic particles get an intrinsic mass? This is due to the Higgs Field. To understand how it works, let's look at the standard model of particle physics.

Every particle is a quantized excitation in its own field. An excitation of the electromagnetic field is a photon, an excitation of the electron field is an electron, etc. All fields, in their lowest energy state, even when no excitations or particles are present, always have fluctuations. These are virtual particles that exist for such a short period of time, that they cannot be measured. They borrow energy from the vacuum and give it right back very quickly when they are annihilated.

But this energy from virtual particles, collectively adds up to no real particles. Real particles are created only when enough energy is transferred to a field from other fields to cause an excitation. An electron can only occur in energy units of 0.511 MeV, which is its mass.
#higgs
But it only has a mass because of its interaction with the Higgs field. Without this interaction, an electron would be massless. A massless electron would be like a charged photon, and move at the speed of light. Without the Higgs field, all the other fundamental particles of the standard model would also be massless, with the possible exception of neutrinos.

So the question is how does this mass come about? To understand this, we have to understand the concept of vacuum expectation value of the various fields.

Let’s imagine there were no Higgs field. If we then took any of the fields and put them inside an empty box, like the electron field, the weight of that box would be zero. In other words the field would have no mass, even though the virtual electrons would be present throughout it. Similarly, all the other fields of the Standard Model would also have no mass inside the empty box, just quantum fluctuations.

But, there is an exception to this rule, the Higgs Field. It is unique because the Higgs Field in empty space, unlike every other field, has a mass. So if were to weigh the box with the Higgs field inside, it would have a weight. This is called the vacuum energy, or vacuum expectation value. It is equal to 246 GeV. This is just the value that we would \