Proposal for new measurements of muonic helium hyperfine structure at J-PARC

Abstract

The measurement of the ground state hyperfine structure of muonic helium has the potential to improve the precision of the mass of the negative muon by a factor of 50 or more. The mass of the negative muon is very important because it enables us to test the CPT theorem by comparison with positive muon mass. We aim to measure the hyperfine structure of muonic helium with a precision 1000 times higher than previous experiments [1,2] using the highintensity muon beam at J-PARC and have already obtained results better than the current precision in zero-field measurements in a test experiment in March 2021. To further improve the precision, we plan to measure in a high magnetic field and incorporate a technique that can produce highly polarized muonic helium atom [3]. In this paper, we will report on these developments.