Muon decay and physics beyond the standard model

This article reviews the current theoretical and experimental status of the field of muon decay and its potential to search for new physics beyond the standard model. The importance of rare muon processes with lepton flavor violation is highly stressed, together with precision measurements of normal muon decay. Recent up-to-date motivations of lepton flavor violation based on supersymmetric models, in particular supersymmetric grand unified theories, are described along with other theoretical models. Future prospects of experiments and muon sources of high intensity for further progress in this field are also discussed.