Experimental particle physicist. Member of the Muon g−2 Collaboration at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Experiment E821. Director of Education at The New Human University.
Paul Dirac's theory says a muon's magnetic strength, its g-factor, should be exactly 2. It isn't. The vacuum around the muon is not empty: virtual particles flicker in and out of existence and nudge g a little above 2. Measure that nudge precisely enough and you are taking a census of everything that exists, including whatever nobody has discovered yet.
So we built a 14-meter superconducting storage ring at Brookhaven, filled it with muons and watched their spins turn slightly faster than their orbits. Twenty-four detector stations around the ring counted the decay electrons. I worked on the electromagnetic calorimeter technology behind those stations. The wobble in their count is the anomaly, aμ.
In other words: if you want to know what's really in the room, measure the one thing that is touched by everything in it. Precisely.
Uncertainty on aμ, log scale. Each generation sharpened the measurement roughly tenfold. The prize honors all three collaborations together.
The collaboration made this pin for the ceremony, and my collaborators wore it on stage. It is the physics in miniature: a muon (μ) meets an external magnetic field (×) through a photon, while the virtual photon in the loop below is dressed by a hadronic blob.
That blob is the hardest piece of the Standard Model prediction to calculate. It is also why the g−2 story kept physicists arguing for two decades.
Excerpt, A to J, as listed by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.
Full list of CERN, Brookhaven and Fermilab co-laureates at breakthroughprize.org.
David Hertzog accepted on behalf of the collaborations. The citation reads: “For multi-decade, groundbreaking contributions to the measurement of the muon’s anomalous magnetic moment.”
Mockup cut with a synthesized score: a low drone, and a pulse each time the muon passes one of the 24 stations. The pulse pans around the ring and swells with the g−2 wiggle. Voice-over is the next pass.