QCD-Instantons in eP Scattering.pdf

a r X i v : h e p - p h / 9 7 0 6 4 0 0 v 1 1 8 J u n 1 9 9 7 DESY 97-114 hep-ph/9706400 QCD – Instantons in e±P Scattering1 S. Moch, A. Ringwald and F. Schrempp DESY, Notkestr. 85, D-22603 Hamburg, Germany Abstract. We review recent theoretical results from our systematic study of QCD- instanton contributions to e±P processes, involving a hard momentum scale Q. The main issues are: the absence of IR divergencies due to a dynamical suppression of instantons with large size ρ 1/Q, the reliable calculability of instanton-induced amplitudes and our inclusive framework to systematically calculate properties of the I-induced multi-parton final state. INTRODUCTION Instantons [1] are well known to represent topology changing tunnelling transi- tions in non-abelian gauge theories. These transitions induce processes which are forbidden in perturbation theory, but have to exist in general [2] due to Adler-Bell- Jackiw anomalies. Correspondingly, these processes imply a violation of certain fermionic quantum numbers, notably, B + L in the electro-weak gauge theory and chirality (Q5) in (massless) QCD. An experimental discovery of such a novel, non-perturbative manifestation of non-abelian gauge theories would clearly be of basic significance. The interest in instanton (I)-induced processes during recent years has been revived by the observation [3] that the strong exponential suppression, ∝ exp(?4π/α), of the corresponding tunnelling rates at low energies may be over- come at high energies, mainly due to multi-gauge boson emission in addition to the minimally required fermionic final state. Since αs ? αW , QCD-instantons are cer- tainly much less suppressed than electro-weak ones. A pioneering and encouraging theoretical estimate of the size of the QCD-instanton induced contribution to the gluon structure functions in deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) was recently presented in Ref. [4]. A systematic phenomenological and theoretical study is under way [5–11], which clearly