Insight into the Role of Instantons and their Zero Modes from Lattice QCD.pdf

a r X i v : h e p - l a t / 9 9 0 2 0 3 2 v 1 2 5 F e b 1 9 9 9 1 Insight into the Role of Instantons and their Zero Modes from Lattice QCD J.W. Negelea? aCenter for Theoretical Physics Laboratory for Nuclear Science and Department of Physics Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA 02139 Evidence from lattice QCD calculations is presented showing that instantons and their associated zero modes play a major role in the physics of light hadrons and the propagation of light quarks in the QCD vacuum. 1. Introduction and Motivation During the quarter of a century I have known Koichi Yazaki as a colleague, collaborator and friend, we have shared an abiding interest in many body physics - understanding how strongly interacting systems develop their rich and complex properties from their fundamental underlying interactions. Hence, it is a special pleasure and privilege to be able to take part in this symposium being held in his honor and to talk about insight my collaborators and I have gotten from lattice QCD into the role of instantons and their associated zero modes in the physics of hadrons. One of the great advantages of the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics and field theory is the possibility of identifying non-perturbatively the stationary configura- tions that dominate the action and thereby identify and understand the essential physics of complex systems with many degrees of freedom. Thus, the discovery of instantons in 1975 [1] gave rise to great excitement and optimism that they were the key to understand- ing QCD. Indeed, in contrast to other many body systems in which the quanta exchanged between interacting fermions can be subsumed into a potential, it appeared that QCD was fundamentally different, with topological excitations of the gluon field dominating the physics and being responsible for a host of novel and important effects including the θ vacuum, the axial anomaly, fermion zero modes, the mass of the η′, and the chiral con