Beyond Jarlskog: 699 invariants for CP violation in SMEFT

As SMEFT is a framework of growing importance to analyze high-energy data, understanding its parameter space is crucial. The latter is commonly split into CP-even and CP-odd parts, but this classification is obscured by the fact that CP violation is actually a collective effect that is best captured by considering flavor-invariant combinations of Lagrangian parameters. First we show that fermion rephasing invariance imposes that several coefficients associated to dimension-six operators can never interfere with operators of dimension ≤ 4 and thus cannot appear in any physical observable at O1/Λ ². For those that can, instead, we establish a one-to-one correspondence with CP-odd flavor invariants, all linear with respect to SMEFT coefficients. We explicitly present complete lists of such linear CP-odd invariants, and carefully examine their relationship to CP breaking throughout the parameter space of coefficients of dimension ≤ 4. Requiring that these invariants all vanish, together with the Jarlskog invariant, the strong-CP phase, and the 6 CP-violating dimension-6 bosonic operators, provides 699(+1 + 1 + 6) conditions for CP conservation to hold in any observable at leading order, O(1/Λ ²⁾.