Global constraints on lepton-quark contact interactions

The Large Hadron Collider can do precision physics at a level that is competitive with electroweak precision constraints when probing physics beyond the Standard Model. We present a simple yet general parametrization of the effect of an arbitrary number of lepton-quark contact interactions on any dilepton observable at hadron colliders. This parametrization can be easily adopted by the experimental collaborations to put bounds on arbitrary combinations of lepton-quark contact interactions. We compute the corresponding bounds from current dilepton resonance searches at the LHC and find that they are competitive with and often complementary to indirect constraints from electroweak precision data. We combine all current constraints in a global analysis to obtain the most stringent bounds on lepton-quark contact interactions. We also show that the high-energy phase of the LHC has a unique potential in terms of discovery and discrimination power among different types of lepton-quark contact interactions.