12.  Quantum Fields and the Higgs Quartic

In modern physics a particle is a ripple in a field. This chapter builds the fields out of the substrate, then goes after one specific number: how strongly the Higgs field pulls on itself. Getting a number like that out of a theory, instead of measuring it and typing it in, is the kind of thing that would make a theory worth believing.

• 12.1. The projected field theory: emergence of quantum fields
• 12.2. Interacting vacuum and M∗-regulated renormalisation
• 12.3. Closure via the binary-gap-tempered partition function
• 12.4. The spectral-action route to the Higgs quartic
• 12.5. Partition-function Chamseddine–Connes framework
• 12.6. The framework in full: F1–F11
• 12.7. Status of the derivations
• 12.8. Summary