Patterns of flavor symmetry breaking in hadron matrix elements involving u, d, and s quarks

Abstract

By considering a flavor expansion about the SU(3) flavor symmetric point, we investigate how flavor blindness constrains octet baryon matrix elements after SU(3) is broken by the mass difference between quarks. Similarly to hadron masses we find the expansions to be constrained along a mass trajectory where the singlet quark mass is held constant, which provides invaluable insight into the mechanism of flavor symmetry breaking and proves beneficial for extrapolations to the physical point. Expansions are given up to third order in the expansion parameters. Considering higher orders would give no further constraints on the expansion parameters. The relation of the expansion coefficients to the quark-line-connected and quark-line-disconnected terms in the three-point correlation functions is also given. As we consider Wilson cloverlike fermions, the addition of improvement coefficients is also discussed and shown to be included in the formalism developed here. As an example of the method we investigate this numerically via a lattice calculation of the flavor-conserving matrix elements of the vector first-class form factors.