Colloquia

The Standard Model of Particle and Nuclear physics makes thousands of successful predictions, based on roughly 20 experimentally determined input parameters. Studies on the Electroweak frontier in particular require extremely precise values for a subset of those parameters, including the Fermi Constant. I will describe the MuLan experiment, which has measured the muon lifetime with unprecedented part per million accuracy, improving our knowledge of the Fermi Constant by a factor of 20. I will describe the physics motivation for the measurement, emphasize the subtle design and analysis challenges of a measurement on the precision frontier, and discuss both our published results and current progress towards our ultimate physics goals.