An investigation into reducing the uncertainties associated with the leading order hadronic contributions to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon

Comparison between theoretical calculations of the anomalous magnetic dipole moment of the muon and its experimentally measured value provide one of the most accurate tests of the standard model and possibly the only current indication of beyond the standard model physics. The disagreement between theory and experiment at the time of writing is 3.4 standard deviations. The errors in the theoretical calculation of the anomalous magnetic moment are dominated by those arising from the hadronic sector. Due to asymptotic freedom, perturbative QCD is inapplicable at low energies, meaning that calculations at these energies must utilise experimental cross sections. This requires processing and synthesising data from many different experiments and using this data to predict a low energy, hadronic contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. In order to investigate this discrepancy further, one must examine and attempt to reduce the uncertainties in the data. Many of these uncertainties are unavoidable experimental or statistical errors, but a large proportion of the errors arise as a result of the combination of different data sets from different experiments, in particular how the different experiments accounted for radiative corrections. In this project an investigation is undertaken into how the various experiments dealt with the radiative corrections and how one might decrease the uncertainty in the anomalous magnetic moment measurement by formulating a procedure to categorise which data sets should be included and which not