A year after its final muon magnetic anomaly announcement, the Muon g-2 collaboration reports a new measurement of a different property of the muon: its electric dipole moment. The work is published on the arXiv preprint server.

Based on an analysis of 25% of Fermilab’s experimental data, this is the most sensitive direct search for a muon EDM ever accomplished. It is the first direct search for the muon EDM conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and only the third search worldwide in the past 50 years.

Searches for EDMs play a vital role in particle physics; detecting an EDM could be key to better understanding the matter-antimatter asymmetry required to explain the universe we see around us. This new result shows that if a muon EDM exists, it must be smaller than what the Muon g-2 experiment can currently detect.