Naturalness and the muon magnetic moment

TL;DR

This paper proposes a minimal model with vector-like leptons to explain the muon g-2 anomaly, revealing a natural cancellation mechanism and predicting new particles within reach of current and future collider experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a simple, calculable model with no new scalars that explains muon g-2 and demonstrates a naturalness violation with a total derivative loop integrand, affecting new physics mass scales.

Findings

The model explains muon g-2 without new scalars.

Leading contributions come from dimension-eight operators.

Future experiments can fully probe the parameter space.

Abstract

We study a predictive model for explaining the apparent deviation of the muon anomalous magnetic moment from the Standard Model expectation. There are no new scalars and hence no new hierarchy puzzles beyond those associated with the Higgs; the only new particles at the TeV scale are vector-like singlet and doublet leptons. Interestingly, this simple model provides a calculable example violating the Wilsonian notion of naturalness: despite the absence of any symmetries prohibiting its generation, the coefficient of the naively leading dimension-six operator for $(g-2)$ vanishes at one-loop. While effective field theorists interpret this either as a surprising UV cancellation of power divergences, or as a delicate cancellation between matching UV and calculable IR corrections to $(g-2)$ from parametrically separated scales, there is a simple explanation in the full theory: the loop integrand is a total derivative of a function vanishing in both the deep UV and IR. The leading contribution to $(g-2)$ arises from dimension-eight operators, and thus the required masses of new fermions are lower than naively expected, with a sizeable portion of parameter space already covered by direct searches at the LHC. The viable parameter space free of fine-tuning for the muon mass will be fully covered by future direct LHC searches, and {\it all} of the parameter space can be probed by precision measurements at planned future lepton colliders.