Sci - The Yang-Mills Mass Gap as a Persistence Criterion: A Pre-Geometric Characterization

Sci - The Yang-Mills Mass Gap as a Persistence Criterion: A Pre-Geometric Characterization Armstrong Knight — intent-tensor-theory.com — 2026 The Yang-Mills existence and mass gap problem — one of the Clay Mathematics Institute's seven Millennium Prize Problems — asks for a rigorous proof that Yang-Mills quantum field theories possess a strictly positive mass gap. This paper proposes a pre-geometric characterization of the mass gap as a direct consequence of the persistence criterion of Dimensionless Mathematics. In the ITT framework, a Yang-Mills excitation stably exists as a particle if and only if its selection number S_YM ≥ 1. Zero-mass non-Abelian gauge excitations are excluded because non-Abelian…