Neutral Currents in the Standard Model: past, present, and future

Presented by Prof. K. Cheung, UC Davis

Discovery of neutral current (NC) more than 25 years ago laid the foundation of the standard model (SM). Ever since then the NC has been tested to a high accuracy. I briefly review the SM and the NC interactions, and some important historical experiments that established the NC.

Collider experiments in the 90's continue to test the NC. I summarize a global set of lepton-quark NC experiments, including the NC deep-inelastic scattering at HERA, hadronic production at LEPII, Drell-yan production at the Tevatron, atomic parity violation, electron-nucleon and neutrino-nucleon scattering. A few popular models beyond the SM that would cause deviations in NC are described. A model independent approach is employed to obtain the constraints on the new physics. I shall also estimate the sensitivity reach in the future experiments at RunII and at the LHC.