The masses of fundamental particles such as the Z and W bosons could have arisen from the twisted geometry of hidden dimensions, a new theoretical paper has demonstrated.

The work has outlined a way to bypass the Higgs field as the source of particle masses, offering a new tool for understanding how the Higgs field itself might have emerged, as well as a possible means of addressing some of the persistent gaps in the Standard Model of particle physics.

“In our picture,” says theoretical physicist Richard Pinčák of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, “matter emerges from the resistance of geometry itself, not from an external field.”