Electric Dipole Moments and CP-violation in the Higgs sector

by Jordy de Vries (Nikhef)

Monday 23 Jan 2017, 16:30 → 17:30 Europe/Berlin

seminar room 2, building 2A (DESY Hamburg)

Permanent electric dipole moments (EDMs) provide a sensitive probe of flavor-diagonal CP violation. If measured they are unambiguous signs of new physics, since CP violation in the quark mixing matrix predict EDMs orders of magnitude away from current experimental limits. The Standard Model (SM) also contains the QCD vacuum angle whose size is strongly limited by EDM experiments. This smallness leaves room for CP violation from physics beyond the SM, which is expected to exist in order to explain the universal matter/antimatter asymmetry. Although EDM experiments involve systems consisting of first-generation particles they nevertheless set strong constraints on anomalous interactions of heavy particles such as the top and the Higgs. Within the SM effective field theory, I discuss how EDM measurements can probe such interactions and how low-energy measurements match up against experiments at higher energies. Along the way, I will illustrate how various effective field theories can be applied to calculate EDMs of complicated objects, such as hadrons, nuclei, and atoms, in terms of more fundamental quantities in a systematic way.