We describe a new technique to determine the contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon coming from the hadronic vacuum polarization using lattice QCD. Our method reconstructs the Adler function, using Padé approximants, from its derivatives at $q^2=0$ obtained simply and accurately from time-moments of the vector current-current correlator at zero spatial momentum. We test the method using strange quark correlators on large-volume gluon field configurations that include the effect of up and down (at physical masses), strange and charm quarks in the sea at multiple values of the lattice spacing and multiple volumes and show that 1% accuracy is achievable. For the charm quark contributions we use our previously determined moments with up, down and strange quarks in the sea on very fine lattices. We find the (connected) contribution to the anomalous moment from the strange quark vacuum polarization to be $a_{\mu }^s=53.41(59)\times 10^{-10}$, and from charm to be $a_{\mu }^c=14.42(39)\times 10^{-10}$. These are in good agreement with flavor-separated results from nonlattice methods, given caveats about the comparison. The extension of our method to the light quark contribution and to that from the quark-line disconnected diagram is straightforward.

• Received 12 March 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.89.114501