Papers · William Alexander Aldred

The Proton's Mass Budget

Published October 29, 2026 · Zenodo · DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23779906

About this paper

The proton weighs 938.27208816(29) MeV. Its three valence quarks, at the masses the Higgs coupling gives them, weigh 9.02 MeV between them. The other 929.25 MeV is not missing — quantum chromodynamics owns it, and lattice QCD has split it into four entries. This paper spends no new physics on that split: it runs the factor census and the coherent noise floor on the chiQCD accounting of Yang and collaborators (2018), in the MS-bar scheme at μ = 2 GeV — quark energy 32(4)(4) percent, glue field energy 36(5)(4) percent, quark-mass term 9(2)(1) percent, and one quarter of the trace anomaly 23(1)(1) percent. The verdict on the balance: the budget balances exactly at its central values, 32 + 36 + 9 + 23 = 100 percent of the proton mass — and the balance is built in at two joints, not found: the momentum fractions are normalized to sum to one, and the trace-anomaly term is taken as the remainder the trace sum rule leaves after the quark-mass term. The account is closed. It is not independently closed. The softest entry outright is the anomaly quarter, which prints the smallest error of the four and earned none of it: a remainder inherits its parent terms’ errors in a shape the printed digits do not show. The comparison with this program’s home bookkeeping is graded RHYME, and this paper claims no new decomposition and solves nothing.

Paper 46 of 95 in the published register. The full text is published on Zenodo under a permanent DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23779906.

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