The Masses of the Light Quarks

Abstract

Talk given at the Conference on Fundamental Interactions of Elementary Particles, ITEP, Moscow, Oct. 1995. The paper reviews the current status of knowledge concerning m_u, m_d and m_s. Qualitative aspects of the resulting picture for the breaking of isospin and eightfold way symmetries are discussed. At a more quantitative level, the review focuses on the chiral perturbation theory results for the masses of the Goldstone bosons. The corresponding bounds and estimates for the ratios m_u/m_d and m_s/m_d are described in some detail.

Comments: 23 pages, 3 figures