{"id":121094,"date":"2021-03-31T09:23:57","date_gmt":"2021-03-31T16:23:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/03\/long-awaited-muon-physics-experiment-nears-moment-of-truth"},"modified":"2021-03-31T09:23:57","modified_gmt":"2021-03-31T16:23:57","slug":"long-awaited-muon-physics-experiment-nears-moment-of-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/03\/long-awaited-muon-physics-experiment-nears-moment-of-truth","title":{"rendered":"Long-awaited muon physics experiment nears moment of truth"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/long-awaited-muon-physics-experiment-nears-moment-of-truth2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>After a two-decade wait that included a long struggle for funding and a move halfway across a continent, a rebooted experiment on the muon \u2014 a particle similar to the electron but heavier and unstable \u2014 is about to unveil its results. Physicists have high hopes that its latest measurement of the muon\u2019s magnetism, scheduled to be released on 7 April, will uphold earlier findings that could lead to the discovery of new particles.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/news\/muons-big-moment-could-fuel-new-physics-1.21811\">Muon <i>g<\/i> \u2013 2 experiment<\/a>, now based at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, first ran between 1997 and 2001 at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York. The original results, announced in 2001 and then finalized in 2006<sup><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-021-00833-2#ref-CR1\">1<\/a><\/sup>, found that the muon\u2019s magnetic moment \u2014 a measure of the magnetic field it generates \u2014 is slightly larger than theory predicted. This caused a sensation, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/35066698\">and spurred controversy<\/a>, among physicists. If those results are ultimately confirmed \u2014 in next week\u2019s announcement, or by future experiments \u2014 they could reveal the existence of new elementary particles and upend fundamental physics. \u201cEverybody\u2019s antsy,\u201d says Aida El-Khadra, a theoretical physicist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After a two-decade wait that included a long struggle for funding and a move halfway across a continent, a rebooted experiment on the muon \u2014 a particle similar to the electron but heavier and unstable \u2014 is about to unveil its results. Physicists have high hopes that its latest measurement of the muon\u2019s magnetism, scheduled [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-121094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-futurism","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121094\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}