>>12155568If you are asking about the rest mass of elementary particles, the answer is indeed the Higgs field. Although the Higgs mechanism was first proposed to explain the masses of the W and Z bosons, the Higgs can also couple to fermion fields, and thus also produce mass. This is known as the Yukawa Interaction, and I don't know enough to explain it.
That said, most mass does not come from the rest mass of particles. For instance, the mass of a proton is about 938 MeV/c2, but the sum of the masses of its quarks is only about 9 MeV/c2. The other 99% of the mass comes from chromodynamic binding energy. Specifically, the energy is in the gluon field and in the kinetic energy of the quarks.
Keep in mind that mass is just a property, as is energy. It is not a "thing" like matter. The mass of a system and its energy are related by E = ?mc2. For a system at rest, this is E = mc2. When you calculate the energy of a system, you have to include the energy of all of its interactions. If a particle like an electron is interacting with the Higgs field, that interaction will have some nonzero minimum energy. So it will therefore have some nonzero minimum mass.
