Strange Quark Mass Determination from Cabibbo-Suppressed Tau Decays

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 .Comment: 28 LaTeX pages, no figure