Masses of light quarks in quantum chromodynamics

We try to determine light quark masses by considering sum rules for the vacuum expectation value of the time-ordered correlation function of two divergences of the axial vector current. The evaluation is carried out at momenta high enough for the non-perturbative contributions to be negligible. We find that the average mass of the up and down quark at a momentum of 1 GeV lies between 3.3 and 7.9 MeV while that for the strange quark lies between 84 and 212 MeV. The ranges of values reflect predominantly the uncertainty in the absorptive part in the low energy region (?1.7 GeV).