Contact Terms, Compositeness, and Atomic Parity Violation

Abstract

The most severe constraints on quark-lepton four-fermion contact interactions come from the agreement of atomic parity violation measurements with the Standard Model. In this letter I note that for contact interactions which arise in theories of composite quarks and leptons, other approximate global symmetries than parity can eliminate the contribution of contact terms to atomic parity violation. The most stringent tests of compositeness therefore come from the high energy collider experiments at LEP II, HERA, and the Tevatron.