Limits on CP-violating hadronic interactions and proton EDM from paramagnetic molecules

Abstract

Abstract Experiments with paramagnetic ground or metastable excited states of molecules (ThO, HfF+, YbF, YbOH, BaF, PbO, etc.) provide strong constraints on the electron electric dipole moment (EDM) and the coupling constant CSP of contact semileptonic interaction. We compute new contributions to CSP arising from the nucleon EDMs due to the combined electric and magnetic electron-nucleon interaction. This allows us to improve limits from the experiments with paramagnetic molecules on the CP-violating parameters, such as the proton EDM, |dp| < 1.1 × 10−23e·cm, the QCD vacuum angle, $$ \left|\overline{\theta}\right| $$ θ ¯ < 1.4 × 10−8, as well as the quark chromo-EDMs and the π-meson-nucleon couplings. Our results may also be used to search for the axion dark matter which produces oscillating $$ \overline{\theta} $$ θ ¯ .