Researchers dedicated to a decades-long quest to measure the magnetic properties of the subatomic muon particle have won one of this year's US$3 million Breakthrough prizes. The results seemingly confirm the standard model of particle physics, but team member David Hertzog, a nuclear physicist at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, says that it is not yet 'game over', with mysteries remaining around why two independent methods used to calculate the model's predictions disagree drastically. The winners of the awards, some of the most lucrative prizes in science, were announced on 18th April. Last year, the particle-physics and accelerator laboratory Fermilab announced the final results of its measurements of the muon's magnetic moment, which causes the particle to wobble in a magnetic field1. This wobble, quantified by the particle's 'g-factor', was pinned down to a staggering 127 parts in a billion. 'It is astonishing that human beings can measure anything to such precision,' says...
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