Electric dipole moments (edms) of bound states that arise from the
constituents having edms are studied with field-theoretic techniques. The
systems treated are the neutron and a set of paramagnetic atoms. In the latter
case it is well known that the atomic edm differs greatly from the electron edm
when the internal electric fields of the atom are taken into account. In the
nonrelativistic limit these fields lead to a complete suppression, but for
heavy atoms large enhancement factors are present. A general bound-state field
theory approach applicable to both the neutron and paramagnetic atoms is set
up. It is applied first to the neutron, treating the quarks as moving freely in
a confining spherical well. It is shown that the effect of internal electric
fields is small in this case. The atomic problem is then revisited using
field-theory techniques in place of the usual Hamiltonian methods, and the
atomic enhancement factor is shown to be consistent with previous calculations.
Possible application of bound-state techniques to other sources of the neutron
edm is discussed.Comment: 21 pages, 5 figure