Tau Decay Determination of the Strange Quark Mass

TL;DR

This paper uses recent tau decay measurements to determine the strange quark mass with improved precision, providing values at different energy scales.

Contribution

It introduces a method to extract the strange quark mass from tau decay data using moments of the invariant mass distribution.

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

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 $\bar{\rm MS}$ scheme, $m_s(M_\tau^2) = (119\pm 24)$ MeV, which corresponds to $ m_s(1 {\rm GeV}^2) = (164 \pm 33) {\rm MeV}, m_s(4 {\rm GeV}^2) = (114\pm 23) {\rm MeV} $.