Of Contact Interactions and Colliders

Abstract

The hierarchy of scales which would allow dimension-six contact interactions to parametrise New Physics may not be verified at colliders. Instead, we explore the feasability and usefulness of parametrising the high-energy tail of distributions at the LHC using form factors. We focus on the process pp -> l+l- in the presence of t (or s)-channel New Physics, guess a form factor from the partonic cross-section, and attempt to use data to constrain its coefficients, and the coefficients to constrain models. We find that our choice of form factor decribes t-channel exchange better than a contact interaction, and the coefficients in a particular model can be obtained from the partonic cross-section. We estimate bounds on the coefficients by fitting the form factors to available data. For the parametrisation corresponding to the contact interaction approximation, our expected bounds on the scale $\Lambda$ are within ~ 15% of the latest limits from the LHC experiments.

5 pages, 4 figures

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• Simplified Models for a First Characterization of New Physics at the LHC
• Flavour physics of leptons and dipole moments
• Constraints on two-lepton, two quark operators
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Cited by in corpus (2)

• A testable radiative neutrino mass model without additional symmetries and Explanation for the $b\to s{\ell }^{+}{\ell }^{-}$ anomaly
• Estimated constraints on t-channel Leptoquark exchange from LHC contact interaction searches