COMPUTING SCIENCE
g-OLOGY
Brian Hayes
Bottled Electrons
One good way to measure g is to capture an electron and
keep it in a bottle formed out of electric and magnetic fields. In
confinement, the electron executes an elegant dance of twirls and
pirouettes. The various modes of motion are quantized, meaning that
only certain discrete energy states are possible. In some of these
states the electron's intrinsic magnetic moment is oriented parallel
to the external magnetic field, and in other states it is
antiparallel. The energy difference between two such states is
proportional to g. Thus a direct approach to determining
g is simply to measure the energy of a
"spin-flip" transition between parallel and antiparallel states.
The drawback of this straightforward experimental design is that you
cannot know g with any greater accuracy than you know the
strength of the external field. A clever trick sidesteps this
problem: Measure the energies of two transitions, both of which
depend on the magnetic field but only one of which involves a spin
flip. For the non-flip transition, the constant of proportionality
that sets the energy scale is exactly 2, whereas for the spin-flip
transition the constant is g. Taking the ratio of the two
energies eliminates dependence on the strength of the field.
Experiments with isolated electrons were pioneered by Hans Dehmelt
of the University of Washington, who kept them penned up for weeks
at a time—long enough that some of them were given names, like
family pets. Although the technique may sound simple in its
principles, getting results accurate to 11 significant figures is
not a project for a high school science fair.
In the case of the muon, measuring g is even more challenging. The
muon is an unstable particle, with a lifetime of a few microseconds,
and so keeping a pet muon in a cage is not an option. The best muon
g–2 measurements come from a 20-year-long experiment
designated E821, carried out at the Brookhaven National Laboratory
by workers from 11 institutions. Clouds of muons with their spins
aligned circulate in a toroidal vacuum chamber immersed in a strong
magnetic field. The apparatus is adjusted so that if g were
exactly 2, the particles would complete each orbit with the same
orientation they had at the outset. But because g differs
from 2, the spin axis precesses slowly, drifting about 0.8 degree on
each circuit of the ring. When a muon decays, it emits an electron
preferentially in the direction of the spin axis. The spatial
distribution of these electrons reveals the rate of precession and
thus the value of g–2.
The latest value of the muon g factor reported by the E821
group works out to 2.0023318416 ± 0.0000000012. This number
differs from the electron g factor in the fifth decimal
place, and its precision is only at the parts-per-billion level
rather than parts-per-trillion. Despite the lesser precision,
however, the confrontation between theory and experiment turns out
to be more dramatic in the case of the muon.
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