Can the electromagnetic dipole interactions probed in precision experiments be the same interactions that generated the baryon asymmetry of the Universe? We address this question by formulating low-scale electromagnetic leptogenesis (EMLG) as a gauge-invariant effective field theory (EFT), rather than as a broken-phase dipole ansatz. The point is not only to connect leptogenesis to laboratory dipole observables, but first to test whether the dipole-dominated dynamics itself can satisfy the cosmological viability requirement. Starting from a softly broken $Z_2$ UV completion, we match onto the $\nu \mathrm{SMEFT}$ dipole operators ${\mathcal{O}}_{NB}$ and ${\mathcal{O}}_{NW}$, run their Wilson coefficients to the electroweak scale, and construct the broken-phase dipole couplings to $\gamma$, $Z$, and $W^{\pm }$. The soft breaking keeps the ordinary Yukawa-mediated sector subleading, thereby isolating the electromagnetic mechanism. We find that the nonresonant hierarchical regime is structurally inefficient, while in the quasidegenerate regime the self-energy contribution is resonantly enhanced and dipole-dominated EMLG can reproduce the observed baryon asymmetry for viable TeV-scale parameters. The same EFT pipeline maps the successful EMLG parameter space onto low-energy dipole observables, including charged-lepton flavor violation, electric dipole moments, and anomalous magnetic moments. Precision dipole searches can therefore constrain, discriminate, and potentially falsify an electromagnetic origin of baryogenesis.

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• Baryogenesis & leptogenesis
• Effective field theory
• Quantum kinetic theory
• Majorana neutrinos
• CP violation