Physicists share glory and fortune after winning $3M to explore muon mysteries

University of Washington physicist David Hertzog can’t wait to find out how the hundreds of researchers working on the groundbreaking project known as the Muon g-2 Collaboration will react when they learn they’ve each won thousands of dollars for the work.

The money comes from this year’s Breakthrough Prize for fundamental physics, which will be awarded tonight during a ceremony in Los Angeles. Hertzog and his colleagues decided that the prize should be divided equally among everyone who was an author on research papers related to the decades-long series of muon experiments.

“There are students who have been in and out of this thing — two years or less,” Hertzog said. “They will be shocked in their lives about something they did a long time ago that they don’t remember doing, they will get a call or an email from the people of Breakthrough, and they will say, ‘What!’ That’s great.”

Hertzog said the money will be distributed to about 400 researchers who were involved in the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab in Illinois and Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. The award also recognizes the role played by the European research center CERN, since 1959. “There was one very old man who was still alive from the 1970 study, but I think he’s dead,” Hertzog said.

Although exact calculations have not been done, dividing $3 million among 400 people would give each recipient $7,500. “It’s not something you can dismiss if you’re a student or a young student,” Hertzog said.

The great moment of the muon

Russian-born technology investor Yuri Milner and his wife, Julia Milner, established the Breakthrough Prize in 2012 to recognize breakthroughs in fundamental physics, mathematics and the life sciences. They also wanted to add Hollywood-style pizazz to the public perception of scientists, even going so far as to roll out the celebrity red carpet at the “Oscars of Science.” This year’s list includes Robert Downey Jr., Eileen Gu, Anne Hathaway, Paris Hilton, Salma Hayek Pinault and Michelle Yeoh.

The $3 million Breakthrough Prize is the richest science prize in the world, surpassing the estimated $1.2 million awarded to Nobel laureates. More than $344 million has been awarded since the awards program was established. Previous winners from the University of Washington include physicists Eric Adelberger, Lukasz Fidkowski, Jens Gundlach and Blayne Heckel, and biochemist David Baker.

This year’s prize in fundamental physics concerns a long-term effort to reconcile experimental findings with one of the most successful scientific theories in history: the Standard Model of particle physics. The theory sets the framework for classifying and understanding a menagerie of subatomic particles – including the muon, which is like an electron but 207 times heavier.

The Standard Model predicts various properties of the muon. One such factor is the strength and shape of the muon’s magnetic field, known as its magnetic moment. A simple theoretical formulation requires the value of the muon’s magnetic moment, represented mathematically by the letter g, to be equal to 2.

Few things in particle physics are simple, however. The experimental test measured the g-factor to be a little more than 2, and that difference was the joy of the Muon g-2 (pronounced “mew-on gee-minus-two”) test.

If there were confirmed discrepancies between the Standard Model and experimental results, that would open the door to new physics. For example, perhaps whole new sets of subatomic particles that could be predicted by theory somehow could not be directly observed. Therefore, physicists all over the world joined forces to determine the value of g, in order to fill the gap between experiment and theory or not in the new frontier of physics.

Over the years, physicists have been conducting well-tuned experimental runs using powerful magnets at CERN, Brookhaven and Fermilab. Hertzog has been on the campaign since Brookhaven joined, nearly 30 years ago, and was part of the team in 2013 when the experiment’s largest magnet was moved from Brookhaven to Fermilab.

Each run reduced the uncertainty around the exact value of g. The biggest breakthrough came from Fermilab’s version of the 2025 study.

“We set a goal of 140 parts per billion, and we got 127 parts per billion,” Hertzog said. “When we wrote this proposal, we were as ambitious as we could imagine, because we wanted to find people who would take it. Then we eliminated all the planned mistakes, better than we expected. Then new ones came, which caused us to have a little struggle.”

At the same time, other physicists were struggling with theoretical models. They estimate the ever-subtle effects of particles moving in and out of the quantum bubble that is thought to make up the fabric of space-time at its smallest scale. Last year, one of the models came up with a range of theoretical values ​​for g that overlapped with the Muon g-2 Collaboration’s range of experimental values.

That makes some say there is no conflict. Science magazine reported: “A famous experiment in particle physics ended not with a bang, but with a bang. But then again, few things in particle physics are easy. Hertzog insisted that reports of the muon’s mysterious death have been greatly exaggerated.

“I just throw up my hands, because after 30 years of working on this, it’s disappointing that it’s not clear,” he said. “Not only has the number they recommended changed, but the certainty of their number has increased significantly. The uncertainty in the theoretical recommendation is actually very large. It has changed, but it’s also very large.”

Hertzog said the Breakthrough award recognizes a scientific mission that is still in progress. “This story is not over yet,” he said. “The story is really about the incredible success of the accuracy of this critical measurement that probes the environment at such a deep and profound level.”

Will there ever be a definitive answer to the muon mystery?

“We don’t know yet, but it’s known, instead of coming out we’ve entered a big cloud of uncertainty,” Hertzog said. “So, I think we’ll find out in a couple of years where that ultimately happens. … Who knows if that will lead to another chapter in this business. But I’m sure we will.”

A great night of success

The Muon g-2 Collaboration’s Breakthrough Prize has been awarded to hundreds of researchers from 31 institutions in seven countries, but only four team members have been selected to take the stage at the award ceremony tonight. Hertzog was joined by Chris Polly of Fermilab, William Morse of Brookhaven, and Lee Roberts of Brookhaven and Boston University.

A special lifetime achievement award for fundamental physics went to David Gross, a theoretical physicist at the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Gross won a share of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for filling in gaps in the Standard Model related to the strong nuclear force. Most recently, he helped write a landmark 40-year national program on particle physics.

Three prizes were awarded in the life sciences:

• Jean Bennett, Katherine High and Albert Maguire of the University of Pennsylvania are recognized for developing a treatment for inherited retinal degeneration that became the first gene therapy approved by the Food and Drug Administration for a genetic disease.
• Another award went to Stuart Orkin, a physician at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital; and Swee Lay Thein at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute to elucidate the mechanism driving the switch from fetal to adult hemoglobin and validate it as a treatment for sickle-cell disease and beta-thalassemia.
• Rosa Rademakers of the Mayo Clinic and Bryan Traynor of the National Institute on Aging won the third prize in life sciences for discovering the most common genetic cause of ALS and frontotemporal dementia.

Frank Merle of the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Paris was awarded this year’s mathematics prize for his breakthrough in indirect equity evolution. His work can have an impact on everything from aeronautical engineering and safety to astrophysics.

Hertzog, on the other hand, is not about to rest. Even as the Muon g-2 Collaboration ends, he has joined the team to conduct another particle physics experiment called PIONEER. That experiment will investigate the contradiction between the Standard Model and observations of pion decay. As was the case with the Muon g-2 experiment, there is a chance that PIONEER could point the way to physics beyond the Standard Model.

“This is a great opportunity for the stock market,” Hertzog said. “That’s how I see it.”