Aida X. El-Khadra Colloquium: The dance of the muon

More than eighty years after it's discovery, the muon, heavy sibling to the electron, is still a source of mystery. In recent years, perhaps no observable has come under greater experimental and theoretical scrutiny than a magnetic property of the muon, called its anomalous magnetic moment, because of longstanding differences between experiment and theoretical expectations. Thanks to a recently concluded experiment at Fermilab, this quantity is now measured with an exquisite precision of 124 parts per billion. The theoretical calculations of the muon’s magnetic moment must account for the virtual effects of all particles and forces within the Standard Model of Particle Physics, where effects due to the strong interactions, are by far the largest sources of theory uncertainty. This is no easy feat, and remarkably, theoretical predictions based on large-scale numerical simulations came together just in time. However, this story, with its many with many twists and turns, is still evolving