The effective Lagrangian which exhibits explicitly the transmission of the CP-violating phases induced via the electroweak gaugino masses below the scale of the spontaneous breaking of SU(2${)}_{\mathit{L}}$×${\mathrm{U}}_{\mathit{y}}$(1) electroweak gauge symmetry is deduced. The formalism is used to compute the one-loop electric dipole moment of the electron including the full set of neutralino states. Contributions of neutralinos other than the photino are found to be significant. It is shown that the current data excludes maximal CP violation in the electroweak sector except for selectron masses ≳200 GeV and photino masses ≳750 GeV.

• Received 26 December 1990

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.66.2565