Variational Backbone and Regime Closures V: Mass from Variational Spectra and Higgs as an Effective Instance Schur complement, projector-valued order-0 terms, and regime closure

This paper fixes a structural mass mechanism within the series contract “one fixed spatialdensity e(·) + three operational readings (R1/R2/R3)”. Mass is defined as order-0 spectraldata of the R1 Hessian at an R2-selected vacuum, equivalently as dispersion data of the R3time-completed representative. For the canonical first-derivative backbone, eliminating theclosed variable F := DI II induces, on the open sector, a Schur complement correction ofthe form −(η2/α)PRan: an order-0 projector term that preserves the Laplace-type principaloperator and shifts active channels. Elimination and the resulting Schur/projector term arerepresentation-level implementations of a declared readout/retention protocol (Part IV); theydo not modify the fixed backbone or its principal operator. After KG normalization, thedimensionless shift is expressed by the series invariant η2/(αβ) = κ2. We state the operatortheoretic gates behind “order-0” and self-adjointness, demonstrate de Rham channel selectivity(exact-only action) via a one-page torus computation, and position Higgs parameters as arepresentation-level factorization of the extracted mass matrix.