Nucleon strange quark content from N_f=2+1 lattice QCD with exact chiral symmetry

Abstract

We calculate the strange quark content of the nucleon in 2+1-flavor lattice QCD. Chirally symmetric overlap fermion formulation is used to avoid the contamination from up and down quark contents due to an operator mixing between strange and light scalar operators, \bar{s}s and \bar{u}u+\bar{d}d. At a lattice spacing a=0.112(1) fm, we perform calculations at four values of degenerate up and down quark masses, which cover a range of the pion mass M_pi \simeq 300-540 MeV. We employ two different methods: one is a direct method where we calculate the strange quark content by directly inserting the strange scalar operator. The other is an indirect method where the quark content is extracted from a derivative of the nucleon mass in terms of the strange quark mass. With these two methods we obtain consistent results with each other. Our best estimate f_{T_s}=0.009(15)(16) is in good agreement with our previous studies in two-flavor QCD.