Measuring the Tau’s g-2 Too

Title : New physics and tau g−2 using LHC heavy ion collisions

Authors: Lydia Beresford and Jesse Liu

Reference: https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.05180

Since April, particle physics has been going crazy with excitement over the recent announcement of the muon g-2 measurement which may be our first laboratory hint of physics beyond the Standard Model. The paper with the new measurement has racked up over 100 citations in the last month. Most of these papers are theorists proposing various models to try an explain the (controversial) discrepancy between the measured value of the muon’s magnetic moment and the Standard Model prediction. The sheer number of papers shows there are many many models that can explain the anomaly. So if the discrepancy is real,  we are going to need new measurements to whittle down the possibilities.

Given that the current deviation is in the magnetic moment of the muon, one very natural place to look next would be the magnetic moment of the tau lepton. The tau, like the muon, is a heavier cousin of the electron. It is the heaviest lepton, coming in at 1.78 GeV, around 17 times heavier than the muon. In many models of new physics that explain the muon anomaly the shift in the magnetic moment of a lepton is proportional to the mass of the lepton squared. This would explain why we are a seeing a discrepancy in the muon’s magnetic moment and not the electron (though there is a actually currently a small hint of a deviation for the electron too). This means the tau should be 280 times more sensitive than the muon to the new particles in these models. The trouble is that the tau has a much shorter lifetime than the muon, decaying away in just 10^-13 seconds. This means that the techniques used to measure the muons magnetic moment, based on magnetic storage rings, won’t work for taus. 

Thats where this new paper comes in. It details a new technique to try and measure the tau’s magnetic moment using heavy ion collisions at the LHC. The technique is based on light-light collisions (previously covered on Particle Bites) where two nuclei emit photons that then interact to produce new particles. Though in classical electromagnetism light doesn’t interact with itself (the beam from two spotlights pass right through each other) at very high energies each photon can split into new particles, like a pair of tau leptons and then those particles can interact. Though the LHC normally collides protons, it also has runs colliding heavier nuclei like lead as well. Lead nuclei have more charge than protons so they emit high energy photons more often than protons and lead to more light-light collisions than protons. 

Light-light collisions which produce tau leptons provide a nice environment to study the interaction of the tau with the photon. A particles magnetic properties are determined by its interaction with photons so by studying these collisions you can measure the tau’s magnetic moment. 

However studying this process is be easier said than done. These light-light collisions are “Ultra Peripheral” because the lead nuclei are not colliding head on, and so the taus produced generally don’t have a large amount of momentum away from the beamline. This can make them hard to reconstruct in detectors which have been designed to measure particles from head on collisions which typically have much more momentum. Taus can decay in several different ways, but always produce at least 1 neutrino which will not be detected by the LHC experiments further reducing the amount of detectable momentum and meaning some information about the collision will lost. 

However one nice thing about these events is that they should be quite clean in the detector. Because the lead nuclei remain intact after emitting the photon, the taus won’t come along with the bunch of additional particles you often get in head on collisions. The level of background processes that could mimic this signal also seems to be relatively minimal. So if the experimental collaborations spend some effort in trying to optimize their reconstruction of low momentum taus, it seems very possible to perform a measurement like this in the near future at the LHC. 

The authors of this paper estimate that such a measurement with a the currently available amount of lead-lead collision data would already supersede the previous best measurement of the taus anomalous magnetic moment and further improvements could go much farther. Though the measurement of the tau’s magnetic moment would still be far less precise than that of the muon and electron, it could still reveal deviations from the Standard Model in realistic models of new physics. So given the recent discrepancy with the muon, the tau will be an exciting place to look next!

Read More:

An Anomalous Anomaly: The New Fermilab Muon g-2 Results

When light and light collide

Another Intriguing Hint of New Physics Involving Leptons