Reevaluation of the hadronic contributions to the muon g−2 and to $\alpha (M^{2}_{Z})$

Abstract

We reevaluate the hadronic contributions to the muon magnetic anomaly, and to the running of the electromagnetic coupling constant at the Z-boson mass. We include new π + π − cross-section data from KLOE, all available multi-hadron data from BABAR, a reestimation of missing low-energy contributions using results on cross sections and process dynamics from BABAR, a reevaluation of all experimental contributions using the software package HVPTools together with a reanalysis of inter-experiment and inter-channel correlations, and a reevaluation of the continuum contributions from perturbative QCD at four loops. These improvements lead to a decrease in the hadronic contributions with respect to earlier evaluations. For the muon g−2 we find lowest-order hadronic contributions of (692.3±4.2)⋅10−10 and (701.5±4.7)⋅10−10 for the e + e −-based and τ-based analyses, respectively, and full Standard Model predictions that differ by 3.6σ and 2.4σ from the experimental value. For the e + e −-based five-quark hadronic contribution to $\alpha(M_{Z}^{2})$ we find $\varDelta \alpha_{\mathrm{had}}^{(5)}(M_{Z}^{2}) =(274.9\pm1.0)\cdot10^{-4}$ . The reduced electromagnetic coupling strength at M Z leads to an increase by 12 GeV in the central value of the Higgs boson mass obtained by the standard Gfitter fit to electroweak precision data.