Electric dipole moments of charged leptons with sterile fermions

Abstract

We address the impact of sterile fermions on charged lepton electric dipole moments. We show that in order to have a non-vanishing contribution to electric dipole moments, the minimal extension necessitates the addition of at least two sterile fermion states. Sterile neutrinos can give significant contributions to the charged lepton electric dipole moments if the masses of the non-degenerate sterile states are both above the electroweak scale. In addition, the Majorana nature of neutrinos is also important. Furthermore, we apply the computations of the electric dipole moments for the most minimal realisation of the Inverse Seesaw mechanism, in which the Standard Model is extended by two right-handed neutrinos and two sterile fermion states. We show that the two pairs of (heavy) pseudo-Dirac mass eigenstates can give significant contributions to the electron electric dipole moment, lying close to future experimental sensitivity. We further discuss the possibility of beyond the minimal Inverse Seesaw models and of having a successful leptogenesis in this framework.