Electric dipole moments of atoms and molecules produced by enhanced nuclear Schiff moments

TL;DR

This paper calculates atomic and molecular electric dipole moments induced by nuclear Schiff moments, focusing on atoms with enhanced Schiff moments due to nuclear deformation, to aid in CP-violation and dark matter research.

Contribution

It introduces a specialized configuration interaction and many-body perturbation theory method for open f-shell atoms and molecules, providing new estimates of EDMs and CP-violating constants.

Findings

Calculated EDMs for atoms with enhanced Schiff moments.

Provided estimates for molecular CP-violating interaction constants.

Updated values of nuclear Schiff moments and related parameters.

Abstract

We perform calculations of the CP-violating atomic and molecular electric dipole moments (EDM) induced by the interaction of the nuclear Schiff moments with electrons. EDM of atoms Eu, Dy, Gd, Ac, Th, Pa, U, Np and Pu are of special interest since they have isotopes with strongly enhanced nuclear Schiff moments caused by the octupole nuclear deformation or soft octupole vibration mode. These atoms have open 4f or 5f shells making the calculations complicated. We use our special version of the configuration interaction method combined with the many-body perturbation theory method adopted for open f-shell case. To validate the method we perform similar calculations for simpler atoms (Xe, Hg, Tl+, Pb, Pb++, Rn, Ra) where some earlier results are available. In addition we present the estimates of the CP-violating nuclear spin - molecular axis interaction constants for molecules which may be of experimental interest including AcF, EuN, ThO, PbO and TlF. We also present updated values of the nuclear Schiff moments and atomic and molecular EDM expressed in terms of the CP-violating pi-meson - nucleon interaction constants g_0,g_1, g_2, QCD parameter theta and quark chromo-EDMs. The results may be used to test CP-violation theories and search for axion dark matter in atomic, molecular and solid state experiments.