The Neutron Electric Dipole Moment from Lattice QCD using a Background Electric Field

We present the calculation of the neutron electric dipole moment (nEDM) $d_n$ using 2+1 flavor domain wall fermion ensembles with fixed lattice spacing $a\approx 0.11\,\text{fm}$ and pion masses of 340, 420, and 576 MeV. We show that the neutron electric dipole moment can be extracted from the energy shift induced by a static uniform external background electric field in the presence of the CP-violating QCD theta-term, $\bar\theta Q_{top}$. Motivated by the Feynman-Hellmann theorem, we employ sampling of the topological charge $q_\text{top}(t)$ on a single time-slice rather than the global topological charge $Q_\text{top}=\int q_\text{top}(t) \, dt$, which dramatically improves the statistical precision of the $\theta$-induced nEDM. Key to our method is to calculate the forward matrix element of the topological charge density in the nucleon deformed by a background electric field. We find that calculation with the traditional positive parity-projected nucleon operator is subject to large excited-state contamination. To remove the contamination, we construct the ground state of the deformed nucleon by solving a non-Hermitian generalized eigenvalue problem. With this approach, we find consistent values for the nEDM when using different nucleon interpolating operators, regardless of whether they are covariant or non-covariant under chiral transformations. Finally, after extrapolating to the physical point, we obtain $d_n=-0.0050(4)^\text{stat}(8)^\text{sys}\bar{\theta}$ $e$ fm, where the systematic uncertainty includes excited-state effects estimated as variation with the Euclidean-time fits and the dependence on the strength of the electric field applied to the neutron. Conventional systematic errors like discretization, finite-volume, and chiral extrapolation effects will be addressed in future work.