Leggett-Garg inequality violation in muon $g-2$ experiments
We present the first study of Leggett-Garg inequality violation in polarized muon spin precession. We formulate a procedure to reconstruct temporal correlators of the longitudinal muon polarization from measured time-dependent muon decay spectra and apply it to publicly available Fermilab Muon $g-2$ data corresponding to approximately $10$ billion muon decays. Using a simplified model of the detector acceptance and efficiency, the Leggett-Garg inequality is found to be violated with a single-bin significance of $5.5\sigma$, while combining neighboring bins further increases the significance. While our analysis is limited by systematic uncertainties associated with the detector modeling, a dedicated experimental analysis could reduce these uncertainties toward the statistical level, $\mathcal{O}(10^{-3})$, potentially enabling one of the most precise measurements of temporal quantum correlations.
Authors
- Brian Batell (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5285-5535)
- Kun Cheng (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4959-2997)
- Morgan E. Cassidy
Institutions
- University of Pittsburgh (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Reports on Progress in Physics
- Published
- 2026-10-14
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6633/aeb43f
- Primary Topic
- Quantum Mechanics and Applications
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Science Foundation
- U.S. Department of Energy
- High Energy Physics