Hadronic Mass Generation through Three-Dimensional Magnetic Locking: A Discrete Mechanism for Linear Confinement and the Mass Gap

We propose a mechanism for hadronic rest mass generation based on three-dimensional magnetic locking of discrete photonic packets within an Endpoint-Only ontology, where physical content is exhausted by interaction events and conditional probability distributions over them.

A single lock fixes one rotational axis; rotational stability in R^3 requires closure along three linearly independent axes, selecting configurations with at least three locks. The mass gap Δ = 3ε_lock > 0 is a geometric corollary. Linear confinement emerges as the energetic cost of extending a one-dimensional lock chain, with string breaking governed by E = mc^2 thresholding.

The three color charges of QCD are identified with the three orthogonal rotation axes; SU(3) is shown to be compatible with this structure under the antisymmetry constraint. The Higgs mechanism is preserved as the parameterization of bare fermion masses; the lock mechanism accounts for the dominant 99% of hadronic rest mass.

A parameter-free cross-check via string tension σ and the mass gap Δ constrains the lock scale ℓ_lock ~ 0.1 fm, consistent with the hadronic scale. This framework provides a purely geometric origin for the Yang-Mills mass gap without invoking a continuous field theory limit.