The strange quark scalar content plays an important role in both the description of nucleon structure and in the determination of dark matter direct detection cross sections. As a measure of the strange-quark contribution to the nucleon mass, the str
ange-quark sigma term (sigma_s) provides important insight into the nature of mass generation in QCD. The phenomenological determination of sigma_s exhibits a wide range of variation, with values suggesting that the strange quark contributes anywhere between 0 and more than 30% of the nucleon mass. In the context of dark matter searches, coupled with relatively large Higgs coupling to strangeness, this variation dominates the uncertainty in predicted cross sections for a large class of dark matter models. Here we report on the recent results in lattice QCD, which are now giving a far more precise determination of sigma_s than can be inferred from phenomenology. As a consequence, the lattice determinations of sigma_s can now dramatically reduce the uncertainty in dark matter cross sections associated with the hadronic matrix elements.
We report on a recent chiral extrapolation, based on an SU(3) framework, of octet baryon masses calculated in 2+1-flavour lattice QCD. Here we further clarify the form of the extrapolation, the estimation of the infinite-volume limit, the extracted l
ow-energy constants and the corrections in the strange-quark mass.
In a global analysis of the latest parity-violating electron scattering measurements on nuclear targets, we demonstrate a significant improvement in the experimental knowledge of the weak neutral-current lepton-quark interactions at low energy. The p
recision of this new result, combined with earlier atomic parity-violation measurements, places tight constraints on the size of possible contributions from physics beyond the Standard Model. Consequently, this result improves the lower-bound on the scale of relevant new physics to ~1 TeV.
