Chiral extrapolations on the lattice with strange sea quarks Original Research Article

The (light but not-so-light) strange quark may play a special role in the low-energy dynamics of QCD. Strange sea-quark pairs may induce significant differences in the pattern of chiral symmetry breaking in the chiral limits of two and three massless flavours, in relation with the violation of the Zweig rule in the scalar sector. This effect could affect chiral extrapolations of unquenched lattice simulations with three dynamical flavours, and it could be detected through the quark-mass dependence of hadron observables [S. Descotes-Genon, hep-ph/0410233].