Origin of Mass in UFQFT: From the Higgs Mechanism to Fractal Resonance in Unified Fractal Quantum Field Theory

The origin of mass remains one of the most profound questions in fundamental physics. Within the Standard Model (SM), mass is attributed to the Higgs mechanism, where elementary particles acquire mass through spontaneous symmetry breaking of the SU(2) × SU(1) gauge symmetry and interactions with the Higgs field. While the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012 confirmed the essential predictions of the electroweak theory, conceptual challenges remain. These include the hierarchy problem, the arbitrary nature of Yukawa couplings, and the absence of a geometric interpretation of mass. In this work, we contrast the Higgs-based explanation of mass with a novel approach developed in the Unified Fractal Quantum Field Theory (UFQFT). In UFQFT, mass does not originate from an external scalar field but emerges dynamically from the resonance structure of two fundamental fields—the scalar energy field (Φ) and the vector charge field (Ψ)-within a fractal space-time of effective dimension D≈2.7. This framework realizes a “mass without mass” principle, where quarks are treated as massless topological singularities, and observable mass arises entirely from field confinement and resonance gradients. By placing the Higgs mechanism and UFQFT side by side, this paper highlights both the empirical strengths of the Standard Model and the conceptual advances of UFQFT, which embeds mass generation into a unified, geometric, and fractal field structure.