A lattice study of the strangeness content of the nucleon

Abstract

We determine the quark contributions to the nucleon spin Delta s, Delta u and Delta d as well as their contributions to the nucleon mass, the sigma-terms. This is done by computing both, the quark line connected and disconnected contributions to the respective matrix elements, using the non-perturbatively improved Sheikholeslami-Wohlert Wilson Fermionic action. We simulate n_F=2 mass degenerate sea quarks with a pion mass of about 285 MeV and a lattice spacing a = 0.073 fm. The renormalization of the matrix elements involves mixing between contributions from different quark flavours. The pion-nucleon sigma-term is extrapolated to physical quark masses exploiting the sea quark mass dependence of the nucleon mass. We obtain the renormalized value sigma_{piN}=38(12) MeV at the physical point and the strangeness fraction f_{Ts}=sigma_s/m_N=0.012(14)(+10-3) at our larger than physical sea quark mass. For the strangeness contribution to the nucleon spin we obtain in the MSbar scheme at the renormalization scale of 2.71 GeV Delta s = -0.020(10)(2).