The pion-nucleon sigma term using lattice QCD

This talk presents recent results obtained by the LANL lattice team on the pion-nucleon sigma term, \sigma_{\piN} that quantifies the amount of the nucleon mass generated by non-zero up and down quark masses. We show that excited states, in particular multi-hadron, N\pi and N\pi\pi states, provide a large contribution. Including these increases \sigma_{\piN} by almost 50% and reconciles the long-standing difference between lattice results and dispersive methods. Such a larger value increases the reach of direct detection of dark matter by a factor of 2.25 in the scalar channel.