Higgs-coupled nonlinear photons: leptons, mesons, baryons, neutrinos, and the weak and strong interactions, with Maxwell, Schrödinger, and gravity as linearizations

Leptons are hypothesised as confined photons: topological solitons of a single nonlinear (Born-Infeld) electromagnetic field within general-relativistic spacetime, with confinement supplied by a scalar "pivot," in the lineage of Williamson and van der Mark. The ring-like soliton yields charge, spin, parity, and the lepton mass generations; linearizing the field about its vacuum returns both Maxwell's equations and the Schrödinger equation. The same soliton, knotted, supplies the rest of the spectrum: an excited unknot (meson), a trefoil whose three lobes carry one-third charge (baryon), an oscillating m=2 loop (neutrino), and the chiral sense of that oscillation (the weak interaction, parity violated by construction). The pivot is identified with the Higgs and carries a stable dark-matter candidate as a second mode. Gravity is general relativity acting on this matter content, with the inverse-square law recovered as the weak-field limit. Every claim is graded as derived, reduced to known physics, accommodated, or open. The Koide functional form is derived (Q = 2/3 as the equal-norm critical surface), with the absolute mass scale allowed but not predicted. The same azimuthal tower predicts doubly and triply charged leptonic solitons whose hydrogenic spectra on a proton are parameter-free; a formation mechanism, electron fusion, is advanced as a graded hypothesis and connected to the soft X-ray continua (cutoffs at 22.8 and 10.1 nm) reported from low-energy hydrogen pinch discharges and to the solar atmosphere, with the energy balance, not the line positions, as the discriminator. Mass conservation across the fusion sends one electron rest mass per event dominantly to the dark sector, with a weak 511 keV electromagnetic leakage. The knotted-baryon, strong, and gravitational sectors rest on topological and partially-computed arguments; coupling values and the early-universe mass-ordering origin remain open.