The MUON project is designed to span five years, making it a substantial undertaking with well-defined milestones and ambitious objectives. The ultimate goal remained the same as it was in the proposal, namely, significantly improve on the precision of the leading-order hadronic vacuum polarization contribution to the muon's anomalous magnetic moment by reducing its error by approximately 40%. This scientific challenge has far-reaching implications, as it seeks to answer a fundamental question: are there only four forces in nature, or is there yet another unknown interaction at play? To achieve this, a clear plan was necessary for the various computational steps. In fact, both the first year's and the second year's achievements exceeded many of the original milestone expectations.
In year one and year two one of the most crucial and time-consuming tasks is the detailed scientific planning, which involves thorough literature reviews, discussions with international colleagues, and informed decision-making regarding the research steps. In the field of lattice QCD, this last step is particularly critical, as a suboptimal decision about simulation parameters can significantly prolong the project timeline by doubling or tripling it.
A significant amount of time and effort was dedicated to producing a main paper, arXiv:2407.10913 [hep-lat] and to its revised versions, for which I am the corresponding author. The paper spans now close to 100 pages and represents a substantial undertaking. Despite being quite a new paper, it has already generated an impressive 120+ citations.
