The Quantum Zeno Effect Links an Error-Correcting Code to Confined Fields: The Selection–Stitch Lattice

In the Selection–Stitch Model (SSM), the vacuum is a quantum code, and the mass of a defect is the cost of verifying it. We ask how a verification cost becomes an energy. We let an excitation that fails checks carry a local mass equal to their cost, and define a state's verification cost as the rise in its energy when this mass is switched on. If the checks fail everywhere outside a region, the strong-coupling form of the quantum Zeno effect makes this cost equal to the lowest mode energy of the field in that region. This energy has the form xħc/L. We read it as an instance of the SSM rule that a defect's verification rate sets its Compton frequency. Landauer's principle, which prices erasure, does not apply to such standing information. For a massless quark, only a mass gives the bag wall. A projector penalty does not, and neither does an electric potential. On the lattice, a color singlet needs a whole tetrahedral cell. With a bond-verification term h added to the code's checks λ, the code maps onto a transverse-field Ising model, and an exact spectral check confirms the mapping. Quantum Monte Carlo on up to 2048 nodes finds free colors below h/λ ≈ 0.09 and a linear potential above 0.11, with a string tension that holds as the box grows. For the proton, the measured charge radius fixes the size of its 13-site verification region. Three confined quarks then give 865 MeV, 8% below the proton mass and nearly independent of the cavity's shape. The SSM's count of the same region's checks gives 938 MeV.