Opportunistic CP Violation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how CP violation in the Standard Model, extended by effective field theory, can occur through interference effects at dimension four, revealing that some CP-violating quantities are less suppressed than previously thought.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic framework using 1551 invariants to analyze opportunistic CP violation at dimension four in SMEFT, extending the understanding of CP violation beyond traditional mechanisms.

Findings

Some CP-odd invariants are less suppressed than J_4.

Opportunistic CP violation can significantly contribute to CP violation.

CP violation at dimension four is less suppressed than expected.

Abstract

In the electroweak sector of the Standard Model, CP violation arises through a very particular interplay between the three quark generations, as described by the Cabibbo--Kobayashi--Maskawa (CKM) mechanism and the single Jarlskog invariant $J_4$. Once generalized to the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT), this peculiar pattern gets modified by higher-dimensional operators, whose associated Wilson coefficients are usually split into CP-even and odd parts. However, CP violation at dimension four, i.e., at the lowest order in the EFT expansion, blurs this distinction: any Wilson coefficient can interfere with $J_4$ and mediate CP violation. In this paper, we study such interferences at first order in the SMEFT expansion, $\mathcal{O}(1/\Lambda^2)$, and we capture their associated parameter space via a set of 1551 linear CP-odd flavor invariants. This construction describes both new, genuinely CP-violating quantities as well as the interference between $J_4$ and CP-conserving ones. We call this latter possibility \textit{opportunistic CP violation}. Relying on an appropriate extension of the matrix rank to Taylor expansions, which we dub \emph{Taylor rank}, we define a procedure to organize the invariants in terms of their magnitude, so as to retain only the relevant ones at a given precision. We explore how this characterization changes when different assumptions are made on the flavor structure of the SMEFT coefficients. Interestingly, some of the CP-odd invariants turn out to be less suppressed than $J_4$, even when they capture opportunistic CPV, demonstrating that CP-violation in the SM, at dimension 4, is \textit{accidentally small.}