Joint extraction of ms and Vus from hadronic τ decays

We study the simultaneous determination of ms and Vus from flavor-breaking hadronic τ decay sum rules using weights designed to bring under better control problems associated with the slow convergence of the relevant D=2 OPE series. Much improved stability and consistency is found as compared to the results of conventional analyses based on the “(k,0) spectral weights”. Results for ms are in excellent agreement with those of recent strange scalar and strange pseudoscalar sum rule analyses, as well as recent lattice analyses, while those for Vus agree within errors with the output from recent lattice-based Γ[Kμ2]/Γ[πμ2] and Kℓ3-based analyses. Very significant error reductions are shown to be expected, especially for Vus, once the improved strange spectral data from the B-factory experiments becomes available.