Abstract
This research seeks to determine the mechanism that produces the mass of hadrons from these particles’ more fundamental make-up of quarks. To date, there is no known potential that could affect a system of quarks to produce an amount of energy equivalent to the rest mass energy of a hadron: a π0 particle of mass 136 MeV is made of a down quark and an antidown quark with a combined mass of 9 MeV. A quadratic confining potential, similar to the Hooke potential, is put into a numerical solver for the Dirac Hamiltonian to produce energy eigenvalues of the assumed quark bound-state system. Much work is done in converting between natural units (c = ℏ = 1) and atomic units (me = e = ℏ = ao = 1/(4πϵ) = 1)to match the units of the solver. The eigenvalues are then compared to the mass spectra provided by the Particle Data Group. Future work can be done to compare the eigenvalues of a 3-quark bound-state system.