Strange Quark Mass Determination from Cabibbo-Suppressed Tau Decays

TL;DR

This paper determines the strange quark mass using recent tau decay measurements, analyzing SU(3) breaking effects and employing perturbative QCD calculations to extract precise values at different energy scales.

Contribution

It provides a novel analysis of SU(3) breaking effects in tau decays to accurately determine the strange quark mass at various energy scales.

Findings

Strange quark mass at M_tau^2: 119 ± 24 MeV

Strange quark mass at 1 GeV^2: 164 ± 33 MeV

Strange quark mass at 4 GeV^2: 114 ± 23 MeV

Abstract

We present a general analysis of SU(3) breaking effects in the semi-inclusive tau hadronic width. The recent ALEPH measurements of the inclusive Cabibbo--suppressed decay width of the tau and several moments of its invariant mass distribution are used to determine the value of the strange quark mass. We obtain, in the MS scheme, m_s(M_\tau^2) = (119\pm 24) MeV to O(\alpha_s^3), which corresponds to m_s (1 GeV^2) = (164 \pm 33) MeV, m_s(4 GeV^2) = (114\pm 23) MeV .