Isospin Breaking in the Extraction of Isovector and Isoscalar Spectral Functions from e^+e^- --> hadrons

A finite energy sum rule (FESR) analysis of the isospin-breaking vector current correlator is used to determine the isospin-breaking electromagnetic (EM) decay constants of the low-lying vector mesons. These results are used to evaluate the corrections required to extract the flavor diagonal 33 and 88 resonance contributions from the full resonance EM contributions to the EM spectral function. A large (~15%) correction is found in the case of the omega contribution to the isoscalar spectral function. The implications of these results for sum rules based on the isovector-isoscalar spectral difference are considered.Comment: Presentation to the 3rd International Conference on Symmetries in Subatomic Physics, Adelaide, Mar. 13-17, 200

Strong Isospin Breaking in CP-even and CP-odd K -> pi pi Decays

Complete next-to-leading (chiral) order (NLO) expressions for the strong isospin-breaking (IB) contributions in K -> pi pi are used to discuss (1) for CP-even, the impact on the magnitude of the Delta I=1/2 Rule, and (2) for CP-odd, the strong IB correction, Omega_st, for the gluonic penguin contribution to epsilon'/epsilon, with particular emphasis on the strong low-energy constant (LEC) and loop contributions, numerical values for which are model-independent at NLO.Comment: 4 pages. Contribution to the proceedings of the 7th Conference on the Intersections of Particle and Nuclear Physics (CIPANP), May 22-28 2000, Quebec City, Canada. Uses AIP 6x9 LaTeX styl

Violation of the Δ\DeltaI=1/2 rule in the nonmesonic weak decay of Λ\Lambda hypernuclei

Violations of the $\Delta$I=1/2 rule are investigated in the nonmesonic weak hypernuclear decay using a weak $\Lambda$N$\to$NN transition potential based on meson exchange. While the weak $\Delta$I=3/2 matrix elements of baryons with pseudoscalar mesons are known to be very small, the same matrix elements of baryons with vector mesons, evaluated in the factorization approximation, are found to be significant. Within the uncertainties of the factorization approximation we find that the total rate increases by at most 6% lying within the error bars of the more recent experimental result. The neutron- to proton-induced rate, on the other hand, can change by up to a factor of two, while the asymmetry parameter is strongly affected as well.Comment: 17 pages. Paper related to a contribution presented at the International Conference on Hypernuclear and Strange Particle Physics (HYP97). Submitted to Phys. Lett.

O(m_d-m_u) Effects in CP-even and CP-odd K-->pi pi Decays

Strong isospin-breaking (IB) effects in CP-even and CP-odd K-->pi pi decays are computed to next-to-leading order (NLO) in the chiral expansion. The impact of these corrections on the magnitude of the Delta I=1/2 Rule and on the size of the IB correction, Omega_IB, to the gluonic penguin contribution to epsilon'/epsilon are discussed

V_us From Hadronic Tau Decays

We study extractions of |V_us| based on finite energy sum rule (FESR) analyses of hadronic tau decay data. We show (i) that the ``(0,0) spectral weight'' implementation (proposed previously in the literature as a favorable version of this analysis) suffers from significant convergence problems, but (ii) that alternate implementations exist which bring these problems under control. Results based on present spectral data are shown to be in agreement with those of other approaches, though with, at present, somewhat larger experimental errors. Sub-1% determinations of |V_us| are also shown to be expected from these alternate analyses once tau data from the B factories becomes available.Comment: 4 pages, prepared for the proceedings of the 9th Conference on the Intersections of Particle and Nuclear Physics (CIPANP06), Westin Rio Mar Resort, Puerto Rico, May 30-June 3, 200

Decay constants, light quark masses and quark mass bounds from light quark pseudoscalar sum rules

The flavor $ud$ and $us$ pseudoscalar correlators are investigated using families of finite energy sum rules (FESR's) known to be very accurately satisfied in the isovector vector channel. It is shown that the combination of constraints provided by the full set of these sum rules is sufficiently strong to allow determination of both the light quark mass combinations $m_u+m_d$, $m_s+m_u$ and the decay constants of the first excited pseudoscalar mesons in these channels. The resulting masses and decay constants are also shown to produce well-satisfied Borel transformed sum rules, thus providing non-trivial constraints on the treatment of direct instanton effects in the FESR analysis. The values of $m_u+m_d$ and $m_s+m_u$ obtained are in good agreement with the values implied by recent hadronic $\tau$ decay analyses and the ratios obtained from ChPT. New light quark mass bounds based on FESR's involving weight functions which strongly suppress spectral contributions from the excited resonance region are also presented.Comment: 28 pages, 10 figure

The Strange Quark Mass From Flavor Breaking in Hadronic Tau Decays

The strange quark mass is extracted from a finite energy sum rule (FESR) analysis of the flavor-breaking difference of light-light and light-strange quark vector-plus-axial-vector correlators, using spectral functions determined from hadronic tau decay data. We point out problems for existing FESR treatments associated with potentially slow convergence of the perturbative series for the mass-dependent terms in the OPE over certain parts of the FESR contour, and show how to construct alternate weight choices which not only cure this problem, but also (1) considerably improve the convergence of the integrated perturbative series, (2) strongly suppress contributions from the region of s values where the errors on the strange current spectral function are still large and (3) essentially completely remove uncertainties associated with the subtraction of longitudinal contributions to the experimental decay distributions. The result is an extraction of m_s with statistical errors comparable to those associated with the current experimental uncertainties in the determination of the CKM angle, V_{us}. We find m_s(1 GeV)=158.6\pm 18.7\pm 16.3\pm 13.3 MeV (where the first error is statistical, the second due to that on V_{us}, and the third theoretical).Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures; final version to appear in Phys. Rev. D; expanded versions of Figure 2 and Reference 3