The effects of flavour symmetry breaking on hadron matrix elements

Abstract

By considering a flavour expansion about the SU(3)-flavour symmetric point, we investigate how flavour-blindness constrains octet baryon matrix elements after SU(3) is broken by the mass difference between the strange and light quarks. We find the expansions to be highly constrained along a mass trajectory where the singlet quark mass is held constant, which proves beneficial for extrapolations of 2+1 flavour lattice data to the physical point. We investigate these effects numerically via a lattice calculation of the flavour-conserving and flavour-changing matrix elements of the vector and axial operators between octet baryon states.