What is a Schiff moment anyway?

Abstract

Schiff moments of atomic nuclei are of considerable interest to experiments searching for undiscovered new physics that breaks time-reversal symmetry. I develop a simple picture of the Schiff moment of a charge distribution, and discuss the interaction of the Schiff moment of a nucleus with the field produced by an electron in an atom.

Equations (10) and (11) added in this version

References in corpus (10)

• Electric Dipole Moments of the Atoms, Molecules, Nuclei and Particles
• Reduced Limit on the Permanent Electric Dipole Moment of ${}^{199}$Hg
• Enhanced T-odd P-odd Electromagnetic Moments in Reflection Asymmetric Nuclei
• Improved limit on the ${}^{225}$Ra electric dipole moment
• The nuclear Schiff moment and time invariance violation in atoms
• CeNTREX: A new search for time-reversal symmetry violation in the ${}^{205}$Tl nucleus
• Atomic Electric Dipole Moments: The Schiff Theorem and Its Corrections
• Screening and finite size corrections to the octupole and Schiff moments
• Nuclear T-violation search using octupole-deformed nuclei in a crystal
• Nuclear Schiff Moments and CP Violation