In a global analysis of the latest parity-violating electron scattering
measurements on nuclear targets, we demonstrate a significant improvement in
the experimental knowledge of the weak neutral-current lepton-quark
interactions at low energy. The precision of this new result, combined with
earlier atomic parity-violation measurements, places tight constraints on the
size of possible contributions from physics beyond the Standard Model.
Consequently, this result improves the lower-bound on the scale of relevant new
physics to ~1 TeV.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures; v2: further details on extraction of electroweak
parameters, new figur