Axion-mediated electron-electron interaction in ytterbium monohydroxide molecule

Abstract

The YbOH triatomic molecule can be efficiently used to measure the electron electric dipole moment, which violates time-reversal (T ) and spatial parity (P ) symmetries of fundamental interactions [I. Kozyryev, N. R. Hutzler, Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 133002 (2017)]. We study another mechanism of the T, P -violation in the YbOH molecule -the electron-electron interaction mediated by the low-mass axionlike particle. For this we calculate the molecular constant that characterizes this interaction and use it to estimate the expected magnitude of the effect to be measured. It is shown that this molecular constant has the same order of magnitude as the corresponding molecular constant corresponding to the axion-mediated electron-nucleus interaction. According to our estimation, an experiment on YbOH will allow one to set updated laboratory constraints on the CP -violating electron-axion coupling constants.