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I'm looking for a non-mathematic answer as I am yet to begin studying physics or calculus, still half a year away. Just a simple explanation in layman's terms. As i understood it, electrons for example are massless before interacting with the field, like photons. so why do electrons interact with the higgs field and not photons and gluons?

Qmechanic
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AbnormalSnow506
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    Before I write an answer, have you seen (at the layman's level) the idea that the photon is a certain mixture (superposition) of two bosons (the $W^0$ and $B$) that do individually interact with the HIggs fields condensate while that certain mixture does not? – Alfred Centauri Dec 24 '19 at 04:03
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    Possible duplicates: https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/23161/2451 and links therein. – Qmechanic Dec 24 '19 at 09:58

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This is a difficult question to answer in layman’s terms without simply saying “that’s how the universe works”.

You might be familiar with an expression called the “Standard Model Lagrangian” that appears on things like mugs and T-shirts, like the ones here. This details all of the fields and interactions in the universe that we know of, save for gravity, dark matter and dark energy. The Higgs field is often referred to using the symbol $\phi$. The Lagrangian, when fully expanded contains terms that look like

$$\sim \phi^2 W^2 \qquad \text{or} \qquad \sim \phi \psi_\mathrm{e}^\dagger \psi_\mathrm{e}.$$

In simple terms, this basically says that the Higgs field interacts with the $\mathrm{W}$-boson field, and the electron field $\psi_\mathrm{e}$.

However, there are no similar terms for the photon, the gluon field, or neutrinos. For the photons this is by definition: the photon field is defined as the part of the electroweak interaction that doesn’t couple to the Higgs field. For the other fields this is because these terms do not match observations. Neutrinos have a bit of a caveat, because they have a very small mass, that cannot be included in the Standard Mode by interaction with the Higgs field, whilst keeping in line with other observations (i.e. no right-handed neutrinos).

Hopefully this helps make things a little clearer.

DavidH
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