The anomalous magnetic moment of the muon: status of Lattice QCD calculations

Understand

In recent years, the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon has triggered a lot of activity in the lattice QCD community because a persistent tension of about $3.5~\sigma$ is observed between the phenomenological estimate and the Brookhaven measurement.

• The current best phenomenological estimate has an uncertainty comparable to the experimental one and the error is completely dominated by hadronic effects: the leading order hadronic vacuum polarization (HVP) contribution and the hadronic light-by-light (HLbL) scattering contribution.
• Both are accessible via lattice simulations and a reduction of the error by a factor 4 is required in view of the forthcoming experiments at Fermilab and J-PARC whose results, expected in the next few years, should reduce the experimental precision down to the level of $0.14~$ppm.
• In this article, I review the status of lattice calculations of those quantities, starting with the HVP.