UC Berkeley

The interpretation of nuclear electric dipole moment (EDM) experiments is clouded by large theoretical uncertainties associated with nonperturbative matrix elements. In various beyond-the-Standard Model scenarios nuclear and diamagnetic atomic EDMs are expected to be dominated by CP-violating pion–nucleon interactions that arise from quark chromo-electric dipole moments. The corresponding CP-violating pion–nucleon coupling strengths are, however, poorly known. In this work we propose a strategy to calculate these couplings by using spectroscopic lattice QCD techniques. Instead of directly calculating the pion–nucleon coupling constants, a challenging task, we use chiral symmetry relations that link the pion–nucleon couplings to nucleon sigma terms and mass splittings that are significantly easier to calculate. In this work, we show that these relations are reliable up to next-to-next-to-leading order in the chiral expansion in both SU(2) and SU(3) chiral perturbation theory. We conclude with a brief discussion about practical details regarding the required lattice QCD calculations and the phenomenological impact of an improved understanding of CP-violating matrix elements.