Theory and Phenomenology of Instantons at HERA.pdfVIP

a r X i v : h e p - p h / 9 9 0 9 3 3 8 v 1 1 3 S e p 1 9 9 9 DESY 99-136 hep-ph/9909338 Theory and Phenomenology of Instantons at HERA? A. Ringwald and F. Schrempp Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY, Hamburg, Germany Abstract We review our on-going theoretical and phenomenological investigation of the prospects to discover QCD-instantons in deep-inelastic scattering at HERA. ?Contribution to the Ringberg Workshop “New Trends in HERA Physics”, Ringberg Castle, Tegernsee, Ger- many, May 30 - June 4, 1999; to be published in the Proceedings. 1 Introduction It is a remarkable fact that non-Abelian gauge fields in four Euclidean space-time dimensions carry an integer topological charge. Instantons [1] (anti-instantons) are classical solutions of the Euclidean Yang-Mills equations and also represent the simplest non-perturbative fluctuations of gauge fields with topological charge +1 (?1). In QCD, instantons are widely believed to play an essential ro?le at long distance: They provide a solution of the axial U(1) problem [2], and there seems to be some evidence that they induce chiral symmetry breaking and affect the light hadron spectrum [3]. Nevertheless, a direct experimental observation of instanton-induced effects is still lacking up to now. Deep-inelastic scattering at HERA offers a unique window to discover QCD-instanton induced events directly through their characteristic final-state signature [4, 5, 6, 7] and a sizeable rate, calculable within instanton perturbation theory [8, 9, 10]. It is the purpose of the present con- tribution to review our theoretical and phenomenological investigation of the prospects to trace QCD-instantons at HERA. The outline of this review is as follows: We start in Sect. 2 with a short introduction to instanton physics, contentrating especially on two important building blocks of instanton perturbation theory, namely the instanton size distribu- tion and the instanton-anti-instanton interaction. A recent comparison [11] of th