Testing new physics models with global comparisons to collider measurements: the Contur toolkit

TL;DR

The paper introduces Contur v2, a user-friendly toolkit that leverages existing collider measurements to test new physics models, aiming to make this approach accessible to the broader high energy physics community.

Contribution

This work presents the first user-facing version of the Contur toolkit, including detailed documentation and guidance for external researchers to perform their own model testing.

Findings

Contur effectively tests new physics models against LHC measurements.

The toolkit enhances accessibility for the high energy physics community.

Manual provides guidance to avoid common pitfalls in using Contur.

Abstract

Measurements at particle collider experiments, even if primarily aimed at understanding Standard Model processes, can have a high degree of model independence, and implicitly contain information about potential contributions from physics beyond the Standard Model. The Contur package allows users to benefit from the hundreds of measurements preserved in the Rivet library to test new models against the bank of LHC measurements to date. This method has proven to be very effective in several recent publications from the Contur team, but ultimately, for this approach to be successful, the authors believe that the Contur tool needs to be accessible to the wider high energy physics community. As such, this manual accompanies the first user-facing version: Contur v2. It describes the design choices that have been made, as well as detailing pitfalls and common issues to avoid. The authors hope that with the help of this documentation, external groups will be able to run their own Contur studies, for example when proposing a new model, or pitching a new search.