Speaker
Prof.
David Hertzog
(University of Washington)
Description
Conventional wisdom suggests that new particles should exist as part of highly anticipated Standard Model extensions. Further, the discovery tool is expected to be an energy-frontier collider, where new particles are produced directly among the debris of the highest-energy pp collisions. The Higgs discovery affirmed this technique; although it has not signaled new physics (yet), it demonstrated the power of such experiments. Nonetheless, with significant data taking now completed at the LHC, the long-anticipated “TeV-scale” discoveries have not yet emerged. What else can one do? In this talk, I will describe the highly sensitive “low-energy” approach, as illustrated in particular by our measurement of the muon’s anomalous magnetic moment, a_mu. Fermilab E989 recently completed its first data-taking campaign, acquiring a data set that exceeds that from the Brookhaven E821 experiment whose result, when compared to modern Standard Model theory, differs by more than 3 standard deviations. Is this a sign of new physics? Most importantly, we need to know if the deviation is real. Accordingly, we have designed and commissioned a new experiment whose goal is to improve by fourfold the precision on a_mu. I will present the status of the run and show blinded (sorry) plots that convey the excellent data quality already realized.
Primary author
Prof.
David Hertzog
(University of Washington)
