The physicist Paul Dirac predicted its value to be g = 2. The interaction between the muon's wobble and the field is quantified by a dimensionless constant called "g," the gyromagnetic ratio. And the more electrons you count, the more precise the measurement gets. So counting electrons tells us the rate of the muons' wobble. Eventually, muons decay to electrons, which are counted by detectors around the inside of the ring.Īnother quirk of nature means that the number of detected electrons varies proportionately to the rate of the wobble. The experiment produces and stores billions of muons in a 14-meter diameter circular magnet called the storage ring. This causes the muons to wobble like spinning tops, with the rate of the wobble proportional to the strength of the field. Our experiment studies how these particles interact with a 1.45 Tesla magnetic field. The muon has a long history of revolutionizing particle physics- even its discovery was a shock. One fundamental building block in the standard model is the muon, a particle similar to an electron but 200 times more massive. Our result, which has not yet been peer reviewed but has been submitted to Physical Review Letters, backs up results from 2021 and sheds light on a massive puzzle in theoretical physics-for which one possible solution could be new particles or forces influencing the measurement. Now, our large international team of physicists working at the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab in the US, has made a measurement of how a certain fundamental particle wobbles that could have massive impacts on the the status of the standard model. Particle physicists are therefore on a treasure hunt looking for any possible deviation from "expected" behavior that could hint at new physics. It neither describes gravity nor the unknown components that make up most of the energy density in the universe: dark matter and dark energy.
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