Electric Dipole Moments of Light Nuclei From Chiral Effective Field Theory

TL;DR

This paper develops a chiral effective field theory framework to calculate electric dipole moments of light nuclei, incorporating beyond Standard Model physics and providing explicit calculations for deuteron, triton, and helium-3.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic EFT approach to compute nuclear EDMs considering P- and T-violation from fundamental QCD and BSM operators, with explicit calculations for key light nuclei.

Findings

EDMs of light nuclei can be expressed in terms of six low-energy constants.

Calculated EDMs for deuteron, triton, and helium-3 at leading order.

Framework links fundamental CP-violating sources to measurable nuclear EDMs.

Abstract

We set up the framework for the calculation of electric dipole moments (EDMs) of light nuclei using the systematic expansion provided by chiral effective field theory (EFT). We take into account parity (P) and time-reversal (T) violation which, at the quark-gluon level, originates from the QCD vacuum angle and dimension-six operators capturing physics beyond the Standard Model. We argue that EDMs of light nuclei can be expressed in terms of six low-energy constants that appear in the P- and T-violating nuclear potential and electric current. As examples, we calculate the EDMs of the deuteron, the triton, and 3He in leading order in the EFT expansion.