Electric Dipole Moments of Charged Leptons from Their Majorana-type Yukawa Couplings

Abstract

The electric dipole moments (EDMs) of charged leptons are significantly suppressed in standard model. It has been found previously that they are even more severely suppressed in seesaw type models by powers of tiny neutrino masses as far as a leptonic CP source is concerned. We investigate whether a Majorana-type Yukawa coupling between charged leptons and a doubly charged scalar can contribute significantly to their EDMs. An observable EDM would then help unravel the Majorana nature of neutrinos by a lepton number conserving quantity. We find that the EDMs are indeed parametrically large, of the form d_\alpha\propto em_\alpha(m^2_\beta-m^2_\gamma)/m^4 up to logarithms, where m_\alpha and m are respectively the masses of charged leptons and the scalar. And they satisfy a sum rule to good precision, d_e/m_e+d_\mu/m_\mu+d_\tau/m_\tau=0. With the most stringent constraints from lepton flavor violating transitions taken into account, their values are still much larger than the mentioned previous results. Unfortunately, even in the most optimistic case the electron EDM is about three orders of magnitude below the foreseeable experimental sensitivity.

Comments: 13 pages, 1 figure, 1 table; v2: corrected typos in eqs. (9,15), no other changes, to appear in PLB