An international team has shown that a long-standing discrepancy in the muon's magnetic behavior stemmed from earlier calculation limits rather than unknown physics. The work supports the Standard Model and removes one major hint of a possible fifth force of nature.
Researchers led by Penn State physicist Zoltan Fodor spent more than a decade using lattice quantum chromodynamics on supercomputers to recalculate the muon's anomalous magnetic moment. Their hybrid method combined theoretical simulations at short and medium distances with experimental data at larger scales, achieving agreement between theory and experiment within less than half a standard deviation.
