Constraining light colored particles with event shapes

Using recently developed techniques for computing event shapes with soft-collinear effective theory, CERN Large Electron Positron Collider event shape data are used to derive strong model-independent bounds on new colored particles. In the effective field theory computation, colored particles contribute in loops not only to the running of alpha(s) but also to the running of hard, jet, and soft functions. Moreover, the differential distribution in the effective theory explicitly probes many energy scales, so even shapes have a strong sensitivity to new particle thresholds. Using thrust data from ALEPH and OPAL, colored adjoint fermions (such as a gluino) below 51.0 GeV are ruled out to 95% confidence. This is nearly an order-of-magnitude improvement over the previous model-independent bound of 6.3 GeV.