Induced CP-violation in the Euler-Heisenberg Lagrangian

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the behaviour of the Euler-Heisenberg effective action in the presence of a novel axial coupling among the gauge field and the fermionic matter. This axial coupling is responsible to induce a CP-violating term in the extended form of the Euler-Heisenberg effective action, which is generated naturally through the analysis of the box diagram. However, this anomalous model is not a viable extension of QED, and we explicitly show that the induced CP-violating term in the Euler-Heisenberg effective Lagrangian is obtained only by adding an axial coupling to the ordinary QED Lagrangian. In order to perform our analysis, we use a parametrization of the vector and axial coupling constants, $g_{v}$ and $g_{a}$, in terms of a new coupling $\beta$. Interestingly, this parametrization allows us to explore a hidden symmetry under the change of $g_{v}\leftrightarrow g_{a}$ in some diagrams. This symmetry is explicitly observed in the analysis of the box diagram, where we determine the $\lambda_i$ coefficients of $\cal{L}_{\rm ext.}^{\rm \small EH}=\lambda_{1}\cal{F}^{2}+\lambda_{2}\cal{G}^{2}+\lambda_{3}\cal{F}\cal{G}$, specially the coefficient $\lambda_3$ related with the CP-violating term due to the axial coupling. As a phenomenological application of the results, we compute the relevant cross section for the light by light scattering through the extended Euler-Heisenberg effective action.