The muon anomalous magnetic moment is one of the most precisely measured quantities in particle physics. Recent high precision measurements (0.5ppm) at Brookhaven reveal a "discrepancy" by 3 standard deviations from the electroweak Standard Model which could be a hint for an unknown contribution from physics beyond the Standard Model. This triggered numerous speculations about the possible origin of the "missing piece". The remarkable 15-fold improvement of the previous CERN experiment, actually animated a multitude of new theoretical efforts which lead to a substantial improvement of the prediction of a µ . The dominating uncertainty of the prediction, caused by strong interaction effects, could be reduced substantially, due to new hadronic cross section measurements in electron-positron annihilation at low energies. After an introduction and a brief description of the principle of the experiment, I review the status of the theoretical prediction and discuss the role of the hadronic vacuum polarization effects and the hadronic light-by-light scattering contribution. Prospects for the future will be briefly discussed. As, in electroweak precision physics, the muon g − 2 shows the largest established deviation between theory and experiment at present, it will remain one of the hot topics also in future.
Lepton magnetic momentsThe subject of our interest is the motion of a lepton in an external electromagnetic field under consideration of the full relativistic quantum behavior. The latter is controlled by the equations of motion of Quantum electrodynamics (QED), which describes the interaction of charged leptons ( = e, µ, τ ) with the photon (γ) as an Abelian U (1) em gauge theory. QED is a quantum field theory (QFT) which emerges as a synthesis of quantum mechanics with special relativity. In our case an external electromagnetic field is added, specifically a constant homogeneous magnetic field B. For slowly varying fields the motion is essentially determined by the generalized Pauli equation, which also serves