COMPUTING SCIENCE
g-OLOGY
Brian Hayes
The Muon's Story
The electron and the muon are twins (or triplets, since there is a
third sibling called the tau). The only apparent difference between
them is mass, the muon being 200 times as heavy. But mass matters
mightily in the calculation of g. Because certain effects
are proportional to the square of the mass, they are enhanced 40,000
times in the muon. As a result, the muon g factor depends
not just on electromagnetic interactions but also on manifestations
of the weak and the strong nuclear forces. The virtual particles
that appear in muon Feynman diagrams include the usual photons and
electrons and also heavier objects such as the W and Z (quanta of
the weak force) and the strongly interacting particles known
collectively as hadrons.
A theoretical framework called the Standard Model extends the ideas
of QED to the strong and weak forces. Unfortunately, however, the
theory does not always allow high-precision calculations from first
principles in the way QED does. The strong-force contributions have
to be computed on a more empirical basis; in effect, even the
theoretical value of the muon g factor is based in part on
experimental findings.
The muon g factor has attracted much attention lately
because the theoretical and experimental values seem to be
diverging. The latest measurements from the E821 group differ from
accepted theoretical values by roughly two standard deviations.
Physicists have not been reticent about speculating on the possible
meaning of this discrepancy, suggesting it could be our first
glimpse of physics beyond the Standard Model. Perhaps the muon is
not truly an elementary particle but has some kind of substructure?
Another popular notion is supersymmetry, which predicts that all
particles have shadowy "superpartners," with names such as
selectrons, smuons and photinos.
One of these adventurous interpretations of the muon results could
well turn out to be true. On the other hand, it seems prudent to
keep in mind that the g-factor experiments and calculations are
fearfully difficult, and it's always possible an error has crept in
somewhere along the way. It would not be the first time. Feynman, in
his book QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, tells
the story of an early computation of the two-loop electron
g factor:
It took two ‘independent' groups of physicists two
years to calculate this next term, and then another year to find out
there was a mistake—experimenters had measured the value to be
slightly different, and it looked for a while that the theory didn't
agree with experiment for the first time, but no: it was a mistake
in arithmetic. How could two groups make the same mistake? It turns
out that near the end of the calculation the two groups compared
notes and ironed out the differences between their calculations, so
they were not really independent.
The story has been re-enacted more recently. In the mid-1990s two
groups independently calculated a small, troublesome contribution to
the muon g factor called hadronic light-by-light
scattering. Kinoshita's group and a European collaboration of Johan
Bijnens, Elisabetta Pallante and Joaquím Prades got
compatible results. Then, six years later, Marc Knecht and Andreas
Nyffeler recalculated the effect by another method and came up with
an answer that was the same in magnitude but opposite in sign. The
other groups rechecked their work, and both found they had made
essentially the same mistake entering formulas into a
computer-algebra program. The correction slightly diminished the
disagreement between theory and experiment.
In mentioning such incidents, my aim is certainly not to embarrass
the participants. They are working far out on the frontier of
computational science, where no maps or signposts show the way. But
for that very reason a certain amount of caution is in order when
evaluating the results.
A definitive understanding of the muon g factor will have
to await further refinements of both the experimental and the
theoretical values. Incremental improvements can be expected soon,
but major advances may be some time in coming. On the experimental
side, the E821 project has been shut down by the Department of
Energy, at least for the time being. As for theory, the next major
stage will require serious attention to the five-loop Feynman
diagrams. There are 12,672 of those. Don't hold your breath.
© Brian Hayes
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