Probing lepton gluonic couplings at the LHC

Abstract: In an effective Lagrangian description of physics beyond the standard model, gluonic couplings of leptons that respect the symmetries of the standard model occur in operators of dimension eight. Normally the effect of such operators is much suppressed in processes that occur at energies below the scale of new physics. For this reason usual studies of the effective Lagrangian are limited to the lowest dimension operators which is typically six. We point out that the large parton luminosity for gluon-gluon interactions at the LHC places these gluonic couplings to leptons within observable reach for a new physics scale near one TeV.