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Comment by dariusj18 | Hacker News Reader

It'd be cool if they could be created and combined in specific combinations and quantities to create new particles that wouldn't exist due to natural formation. Sounds like a good sci-fi mechanic, creating new particles without the Higgs Boson to facilitate FTL or at least some sort of anti-gravity.

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Note that the Higgs Boson has no part in the mass (and presumably gravitational interaction) of elementary fermions like quarks or electrons, and even less to do with the mass of hadrons (whose mass is the mass of quarks + the mass of the extraordinary amount of energy sticking the quarks together, which dwarfs the mass of the quarks by ~100:1). Even if all elementary particles were massless, protons, nuclei, and atoms would still have most of the mass they have today (though of course many other interactions would be very different indeed).

What is the Higgs Boson responsible for if it's not involved in the mass of fermions or hadrons?

The mass of the massive gauge bosons, the W and Z bosons.

Edit: there is an excellent in-depth (but math-light) explanation about the Higgs mechanism by Leonard Susskind. I highly recommend it if you are interested, it lasts about 1h (plus some Q&A) and is extremely approachable, while being presented by an established authority in the field.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqNg819PiZY

unless im wrong (im not a physicist) interaction with the higgs field does give a none zero amount of mass to quarks. but the vast majority of mass of a proton ~99% is due to the energy in the gluon field

> Note that the Higgs Boson has no part in the mass (and presumably gravitational interaction) of elementary fermions like quarks or electrons

This is incorrect — the coupling with the Higgs field is responsible for the rest mass of electrons and isolated quarks.

> and even less to do with the mass of hadrons

Yes, this is true — the contribution of the separate masses of the constituent quarks to the mass of hadrons is small, like you write.

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