UC Santa Barbara

Selection rules arising from accidental or broken symmetries may be sufficiently obscure that their agency is hidden, leading to the appearance of “magic zeroes” — quantities that are suppressed without apparent recourse to a symmetry explanation. Magic zeroes and their corresponding hidden symmetries may shed new light on parametric hierarchies in the Standard Model and beyond. We identify the hidden symmetry responsible for a recently-discovered magic zero, the vanishing of the putative leading contribution to the anomalous dipole moments of the muon upon integrating out weak doublet and singlet vector-like fermions. Some of the tools involved — spurion analysis leveraging discrete symmetries of the free theory, field redefinitions, spectator fields, and non-supersymmetric non-renormalization theorems — may prove useful in the hunt for new magic zeroes and their hidden symmetries.