Constraining flavoured contact interactions at the LHC

Abstract

Contact interactions are the low-energy footprints of New Physics, so ideally, constraints upon them should be as generic and model independent as possible. Hadron colliders search for four-quark contact interactions with incident valence quarks, and the LHC currently sets limits on a flavour sum (over uu,dd and ud) of selected interactions. We approximately translate these bounds to a more complete (and larger) set of dimension-six interactions of specified flavours. These estimates are obtained at the parton level, are mostly analytic and are less restrictive than the experimental bounds on flavour-summed interactions. The estimates may scale in a simple way to higher energy and luminosity.