Global study of electron-quark contact interactions

Abstract

We perform a global fit of data relevant to eeqq contact interactions, including deep inelastic scattering at high Q{sup 2} from ZEUS and H1, atomic physics parity violation in cesium from JILA, polarized e{sup {minus}} on nuclei scattering experiments at SLAC, Mainz and Bates, Drell-Yan production at the Fermilab Tevatron, the total hadronic cross section {sigma}{sub had} at CERN LEP, and neutrino-nucleon scattering from CCFR. With only the new DESY HERA data, the presence of contact interactions improves the fit compared to the standard model. When other data sets are included, the size of the contact contributions is reduced and the overall fit represents no real improvement over the standard model. {copyright} {ital 1997} {ital The American Physical Society}