Decay constants, light quark masses and quark mass bounds from light quark pseudoscalar sum rules

The flavor $ud$ and $us$ pseudoscalar correlators are investigated using families of finite energy sum rules (FESR's) known to be very accurately satisfied in the isovector vector channel. It is shown that the combination of constraints provided by the full set of these sum rules is sufficiently strong to allow determination of both the light quark mass combinations $m_u+m_d$, $m_s+m_u$ and the decay constants of the first excited pseudoscalar mesons in these channels. The resulting masses and decay constants are also shown to produce well-satisfied Borel transformed sum rules, thus providing non-trivial constraints on the treatment of direct instanton effects in the FESR analysis. The values of $m_u+m_d$ and $m_s+m_u$ obtained are in good agreement with the values implied by recent hadronic $\tau$ decay analyses and the ratios obtained from ChPT. New light quark mass bounds based on FESR's involving weight functions which strongly suppress spectral contributions from the excited resonance region are also presented.