Light-quark dipole operators at the LHC

Abstract

We study the effect of operators generating dipole couplings of the light quarks to electroweak gauge bosons on several observables at the LHC. We start by demonstrating that the determination of the gauge- boson self-couplings from electroweak diboson production at LHC is robust under the inclusion of those quark dipole operators even when let them totally unconstrained in the analysis. Conversely, we determine the bounds that the diboson data imposes on the light-quark dipole couplings and show that they represent a significant improvement over the limits arising from Z and W electroweak precision measurements. We also explore the sensitivity of the Drell-Yan cross section determination at LHC Run 1, and the results on resonance searches in high invariant-mass lepton pair production at Run 2 to further constrain the electroweak dipole couplings of the light quarks.