Model-independent global constraints on new physics

Using effective-Lagrangian techniques we perform a systematic survey of the lowest-dimension effective interactions through which heavy physics might manifest itself in present experiments. We do not restrict ourselves to special classes of effective interactions (such as "oblique" corrections). We compute the effects of these operators on all currently well-measured electroweak observables, both at low energies and at the $Z$ resonance, and perform a global fit to their coefficients. Despite the fact that a great many operators arise in our survey, we find that most are quite strongly bounded by the current data. We use our survey to systematically identify those effective interactions which are not well bounded by the data—these could very well include large new-physics contributions. Our results may also be used to efficiently confront specific models for new physics with the data, as we illustrate with an example.