We calculate the nucleon sigma term in two-flavor lattice QCD utilizing the Feynman-Hellman theorem. Both sea and valence quarks are described by the overlap fermion formulation, which preserves exact chiral and flavor symmetries on the lattice. We analyse the lattice data for the nucleon mass using the analytical formulae derived from the baryon chiral perturbation theory. From the data at valence quark mass set different from sea quark mass, we may extract the sea quark contribution to the sigma term, which corresponds to the strange quark content. We find that the strange quark content is much smaller than the previous lattice calculations and phenomenological estimates.
@article{arxiv.0806.4744,
title = {Nucleon sigma term and strange quark content from lattice QCD with exact chiral symmetry},
author = {H. Ohki and H. Fukaya and S. Hashimoto and T. Kaneko and H. Matsufuru and J. Noaki and T. Onogi and E. Shintani and N. Yamada and for JLQCD Collaboration},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0806.4744},
year = {2009}
}