Evidence for the Role of Instantons in Hadron Structure from Lattice QCD

TL;DR

This study uses lattice QCD with cooling techniques to demonstrate that instantons play a dominant role in shaping light hadron structure and quark behavior in the QCD vacuum.

Contribution

It provides strong lattice QCD evidence that instantons are crucial for understanding hadron structure, using a novel cooling filter method.

Findings

Agreement between cooled and uncooled results supports instanton dominance

Instantons significantly influence vacuum correlation functions

Quark propagation is affected by instanton configurations

Abstract

Cooling is used as a filter on a set of gluon fields sampling the Wilson action to selectively remove essentially all fluctuations of the gluon field except for the instantons. The close agreement between quenched lattice QCD results with cooled and uncooled configurations for vacuum correlation functions of hadronic currents and for density-density correlation functions in hadronic bound states provides strong evidence for the dominant role of instantons in determining light hadron structure and quark propagation in the QCD vacuum.