A fluke ?

Meanwhile, in 2020, a group of 170 experts known as the Muon g-2 Theory Initiative published a new consensus value of the theoretical value of the muon’s magnetic moment , based...

It might also lead in time to explanations for the kinds of cosmic mysteries that have long preoccupied our lonely species. What exactly is dark matter , the unseen stuff that astronomers say makes up one...

The particle célèbre is the muon, which is akin to an electron but far heavier, and is an integral element of the cosmos. Dr. Polly and his colleagues — an international team of 200 physicists from seven countries — found that muons did not behave as predicted when shot through an intense magneti...

Muons are an unlikely particle to hold center stage in physics. Sometimes called “fat electrons,” they resemble the familiar elementary particles that power our batteries, lights and computers and whiz around the nuclei of atoms; they have a negative electrical charge, and they have a property ca...

Muons owe their current fame to a quirk of quantum mechanics, the nonintuitive rules that underlie the atomic realm. Among other things, quantum theory holds that empty space is not really empt...

The team had to accommodate another wrinkle. To avoid human bias — and to prevent any fudging — the experimenters engaged in a practice, called blinding, that is common to big experiments. In this case, the master clock that keeps track of the muons’ wobble had been set to a rate unknown to the r...

But they are 207 times as massive as their better-known cousins. They are also unstable, decaying radioactively into electrons and super-lightweight particles called neutrinos in 2.2 millionths of a second.