Heavy-quark contribution to the proton's magnetic moment

Abstract

We study the contribution to the proton's magnetic moment from a heavy quark sea in quantum chromodynamics. The heavy quark is integrated out perturbatively to obtain an effective dimension-6 magnetic moment operator composed of three gluon fields. The leading contribution to the matrix element in the proton comes from a quadratically divergent term associated with a light-quark tensor operator. With an approximate knowledge of the proton's tensor charge, we conclude that a heavy sea-quark contribution to the proton's magnetic moment is positive in the asymptotic limit. We comment on the implication of this result for the physical strange quark.

4 pages, 2 figures