Constraints on the universal contact interaction

Forces beyond those of the standard model may manifest themselves at low energies as four-fermion contact interactions. If these new forces are independent of colour and flavour quantum numbers including baryon and lepton number, then all low energy constraints, arising from quark-lepton universality, flavour-changing neutral currents and atomic parity violation are evaded. This is due to the global U(45) symmetry which the standard model exhibits in the limit of vanishing gauge and Yukawa couplings. The corresponding contact interaction is a unique current-current interaction. Constraints from LEP2 imply that this universal contact interaction cannot be the origin of the recently observed high-Q(2) events at HERA. (C) 1997 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.