A strange contribution to the neutron EDM

A bstract We analyze the contribution of hypothetical quark electric dipoles to the electric dipole moment (EDM) of the neutron. Particular emphasis is devoted to the strange quark contribution. Considerations based on perturbative QCD, the large N expansion, a critical reassessment of the non-relativistic quark model as well as a next to leading order calculation in heavy baryon effective field theory, all consistently indicate that, barring accidental cancellations, the matrix element of the strange quark dipole should be of the order of a tenth of those of the valence quarks. This implies that the strange EDM provides the dominant contribution to the neutron EDM in many scenarios beyond the Standard Model.