Determining the strange quark mass in Cabibbo-suppressed τ lepton decays Original Research Article

In this work radiative corrections in the total hadronic decay rate of the τ lepton and some moments of its differential distributions are studied employing perturbative QCD and the operator product expansion. We calculate quadratic quark mass corrections in the strange mass to the decay rate ratio Rτ to the order O(αs3m2) and find that they contribute appreciably to the Cabibbo-suppressed decay modes of the τ lepton. Using the results of a recent experimental analysis, we obtain ms(1 GeV) = 200 ± 40exp ± 30th MeV.