Operational Mass and Accessibility Renormalization in Composite Systems

Arc III — Matter Paper 2 Title Operational Mass and Accessibility Renormalization in Composite Systems Zenodo DOI 10.5281/zenodo.18225839 This paper extends the operational notion of mass developed in Arc III, Paper 1 by analyzing how mass renormalizes in composite systems under finite accessibility. Rather than assuming additivity or intrinsic mass parameters, the paper demonstrates that effective mass emerges from how internal degrees of freedom modulate the accessibility of external probes. Using an explicitly operational framework, the analysis shows that composite systems generically exhibit nontrivial mass renormalization depending on probe resolution, coupling structure, and internal correlation volume. Apparent violations of naive mass additivity are shown to arise naturally once accessibility constraints are properly accounted for, without invoking exotic dynamics or modified inertia. The paper establishes that operational mass is a scale-dependent quantity, analogous to renormalized couplings in effective field theory, but grounded in inference limits rather than microphysical assumptions. This result provides a principled explanation for why different experimental protocols can assign different inertial or gravitational masses to the same underlying system. These findings motivate the stronger no-go results of Arc III, Paper 3, where the impossibility of protocol-independent mass is formalized. Keywords Operational mass; accessibility renormalization; composite systems; scale dependence; inference limits; emergent mass; foundations of gravity; dark sector phenomenology Notes (Optional / Internal) Arc III — Matter Extends: Operational Mass–Energy Equivalence Leads to: No Protocol-Independent Mass: A General No-Go Theorem