Leggett-Garg Inequality Violation in Muon $g-2$ Experiments

Abstract

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.