Paper V of the Hydrodynamic Quantum Gravity (HQG) series
Nuclear Forces, Mass Generation, and Topological Statistics in Superfluid Vacuum Theory
Plain-language overview
Modern physics has a famous problem: when quantum field theory estimates the vacuum’s energy density, it predicts a value that is catastrophically larger than what we observe in cosmology. This is often called the vacuum catastrophe.
The HQG programme explores a different starting point: empty space may be “empty” in substance, but still have structure — and some aspects of its dynamics can be modelled using the mathematics of a chiral superfluid (in the universality class of superfluid Helium-3A). Importantly, this is presented as an effective description, not as a claim that space is literally a material fluid with an observable preferred rest frame.
Earlier papers in the series develop models for gravity (acoustic radiation pressure / Secondary Bjerknes force), electromagnetism (pressure gradients and vorticity analogues), and quantum mechanics (Madelung hydrodynamics). This paper focuses on “the next hard questions”: nuclear forces and confinement, mass generation, tensor gravitational waves, and a topological route to spin–statistics.
What this paper tries to add (in one page)
This paper is a synthesis paper. It surveys several mechanisms from existing physics literature that are compatible with the HQG “effective vacuum” perspective, and it highlights what is already coherent, what is still speculative, and what remains open.
- Confinement (QCD): treats confinement via dual superconductivity — the idea that a vacuum can behave like a medium that squeezes colour-electric fields into flux tubes (a natural route to a linear confining potential).
- Electroweak symmetry breaking: frames symmetry breaking as a phase-transition-style phenomenon in an effective condensate description, drawing on the historical connection between the Higgs mechanism and superconductivity (the Anderson–Higgs mechanism).
- Mass / inertia mechanism (sketch): explores candidate routes where effective mass emerges from interactions with vacuum fluctuations (e.g., zero-point-field style approaches), alongside a hydrodynamic “added mass” intuition.
- Tensor gravitational waves: addresses the classic “fluids are scalar” objection by emphasising that a chiral superfluid order parameter can be tensorial; an emergent metric built from a triad/tetrad can naturally produce tensor perturbations.
- Spin–statistics (topology): proposes a topological account in which bosons/fermions correspond to different defect windings, and exchange statistics follow from the topology of braiding paths.
What’s stated as open (not claimed as solved)
Where the identifications are incomplete, they’re presented as open problems rather than “done”. For example: a fully explicit SU(3) emergence mechanism, a complete numerical mass spectrum derivation, and a full gravitational-wave waveform derivation matching LIGO templates are treated as major future milestones rather than settled results.
Citation
Harrison, R. W. (2026). The Hydrodynamic Vacuum: Nuclear Forces, Mass Generation, and Topological Statistics in Superfluid Vacuum Theory. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18230789
Keywords
Keywords: Hydrodynamic Quantum Gravity, superfluid vacuum theory, Helium-3A universality class, chiral superfluid, emergent gravity, confinement, dual superconductivity, QCD flux tubes, electroweak symmetry breaking, Anderson–Higgs mechanism, mass generation, zero-point field, added mass, emergent metric, tetrad formalism, tensor gravitational waves, spin–statistics, topological defects, half-quantum vortices