Determining the Strange Quark Mass in Cabibbo Suppressed Tau Lepton Decays

In this work radiative corrections in the total hadronic decay rate of the tau-lepton and some moments of its differential distributions are studied employing perturbative QCD and the operator product expansion. We calculate quadratic quark mass corrections in the strange mass to the decay rate ratio R_tau to the order O(\alpha_s^3 m^2) and find that they contribute appreciably to the Cabibbo suppressed decay modes of the tau-lepton. Using the results of a recent experimental analysis, we obtain m_s(1 GeV) = 200 \pm 40_exp \pm 30_th MeV.