Physicists spellbound by deepening mystery of muon particle’s magnetism

New consensus

“As time goes by, the different groups are converging on a result that agrees with BMW’s, at least in the intermediate window,” says Davide Giusti, a physicist at the University of Regensburg, Germany, who is a former member of Simula’s collaboration, and who now works with another lattice-QCD group led by his Regensburg colleague Christoph Lehner.But the calculations are still preliminary, and could end up diverging once they are applied beyond the current window. “We don't yet know if lattice results from other collaborations agree with the BMW result for the other pieces” of the calculation, says Aida El-Khadra, a theorist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who is part of another lattice-QCD effort.Long-awaited muon physics experiment nears moment of truthMoreover, the Muon g – 2 experimental result is still higher than the value calculated by lattice QCD, so it’s too soon to conclude that the standard model was correct all along. The Fermilab experiment expects to publish an updated value for the magnetic moment next year, but “even if the gap between theoretical prediction and experiment turns out to be smaller — even if it’s only half as much — it would still be a large discrepancy”, Wittig says.And if lattice QCD and experiments do end up converging on the same value, physicists would still need to explain why the 2020 consensus paper was so off the mark, says Sven Heinemeyer, a theoretical physicist at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory outside Geneva, Switzerland.For now, physicists are left scratching their heads. “It would be hard to believe that all of our lattice simulations were wrong,” says Aubin. But it’s also hard to imagine how the data-driven calculations from 2020 could have gone awry, he says.Still, it’s already clear that lattice QCD will have a significant impact on the muon magnetism question, says Giusti. “This calculation is truly exciting, and whatever the answer is, it will be decisive.” 

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