Higgs couplings to fermions and origin of mass
This text mentions work from 2024 on. Those parts were partly written without a live literature search and have not been checked by an editor yet.
In the Standard Model every quark and charged lepton gets its mass from the Higgs field, with an interaction strength proportional to its mass. This is confirmed for the three heaviest fermions (top, bottom, tau) but not for the lighter ones that make up ordinary matter.
Why it matters
Whether the electron and the light quarks get their mass from the Higgs is untested, and a deviation would bear directly on the origin of the flavor pattern.
Review
ATLAS Collaboration, Characterising the Higgs boson with ATLAS data from Run 2 of the LHC, Physics Reports, 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.05498 reference checked
Timestamp record
- Signed record
- 42ba48ba8c4c…
- Public log
- Entry 245, in checkpoint 2,123
- In the log by
- Block 969,698, 2026-10-03
This text was in the PubPhys log by that date. The date says nothing about when the problem was first posed.