Hadron masses and the sigma commutator in light of chiral perturbation theory

We analyze carefully the impact of non-analytic chiral corrections to the mass spectrum of the pseudoscalar meson octet J^P = 0^? and the baryon octet $\text{J}{}^{\mathrm{<mtext>P</mtext>}}\text{=}\text{1}\text{2}{}^{\mathrm{+}}$. We find that the quark mass ratios must lie in the range $\text{21 ≤}\text{m}{}_{\mathrm{<mtext>s</mtext>}}\text{m}\text{?}\text{≤ 32}$ and $\text{1.6 ≤}\text{m}{}_{\mathrm{<mtext>d</mtext>}}\text{m}{}_{\mathrm{<mtext>u</mtext>}}\text{≤ 2.2}$. We also calculate the analogous corrections to the pion-nucleon sigma commutator σ_πN. It turns out that the value σ_πN = 60 MeV is not compatible with the structure of the meson and baryon spectrum, unless the nucleon mass is smaller than 600 MeV in the chiral limit m_u = m_d = m_s = 0.