Related papers: Instantons at Strong Coupling, Averaging over Vacu…
A longstanding puzzle concerns the calculation of the gluino condensate <{tr\lambda^2\over 16\pi^2}> = c\Lambda^3 in N=1 supersymmetric SU(N) gauge theory: so-called weak-coupling instanton (WCI) calculations give c=1, whereas…
We perform a semi-classical study of chiral symmetry breaking and of the spectrum of the Dirac operator in QCD with adjoint fermions. For this purpose we calculate matrix elements of the adjoint Dirac operator between instanton zero modes…
We calculate the leading weak-coupling instanton contribution to the moduli-space metric of N=2 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory with gauge group SU(2) compactified on R^3 x S^1. The results are in precise agreement with the semiclassical…
The strongly coupled vacua of an N=1 supersymmetric gauge theory can be described by imposing quantization conditions on the periods of the gauge theory resolvent, or equivalently by imposing factorization conditions on the associated N=2…
The instanton vacuum provides an effective description of chiral symmetry breaking by local topological fluctuations of the gauge fields, as observed in lattice QCD simulations. The resulting effective dynamics at momenta below $1/\bar\rho…
We determine the gluino condensate $< \Tr \lambda^2 >$ in the pure ${\cal N}=1$ super Yang-Mills theory (SYM) for the classical gauge groups $SU(r+1)$, $SO(2r+1)$, $USp(2r)$ and $SO(2r)$, by deforming the pure ${\cal N}=2$ SYM theory with…
We compute instanton corrections to non-minimal correlation functions of chiral primary operators in the N=4 super Yang-Mills super-current multiplet. Using a representation in terms of Mellin integrals, we find that these corrections can…
We study instanton solutions and superpotentials for the large number of vacua of the plane-wave matrix model and a 2+1 dimensional Super Yang-Mills theory on $R\times S^2$ with sixteen supercharges. We get the superpotential in the weak…
We analyze the instanton transitions in the framework of the gauge invariant variational calculation in the pure Yang-Mills theory. Instantons are identified with the saddle points in the integration over the gauge group which projects the…
Using Ward identities of N=1/2 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory, we show that while the partition function and antichiral gluino condensates remain invariant under the $C$ deformation, chiral gluino correlators can get contributions from…
Using the renormalization group motivated smoothing technique we study the semiclassical structure of the pure Yang-Mills vacuum. We carefully check that identified clusters of topological charge behave like instantons around their centers.…
Field strength formulated Yang-Mills theory is confronted with the traditional formulation in terms of gauge fields. It is shown that both formulations yield the same semiclassics, in particular the same instanton physics. However, at the…
The one-instanton contributions to various correlation functions of supercurrents in four-dimensional N=4 supersymmetric SU(2) Yang-Mills theory are evaluated to the lowest order in perturbation theory.Expressions of the same form are…
We examine the role of instantons in the zero-temperature chiral phase transition in an SU(N) gauge theory. For a range of N_f (the number of fermion flavors) depending on N, the theory exhibits an infrared fixed point at coupling…
The field strength correlators at zero temperature are semi-classically evaluated fitting the random instanton liquid model to lattice data for quenched SU(3) lattice gauge theory. We restrict ourselves to the lowest order in an instanton…
We suggest a constrained instanton (CI) solution in the physical QCD vacuum which is described by large-scale vacuum field fluctuations. This solution decays exponentially at large distances. It is stable only if the interaction of the…
N=1^* gauge theories are believed to have fractional instanton contributions in the confining vacua. D3 brane probe computations in gravitation dual of large-N N=2^* gauge theories point to the absence of such contributions in the low…
Correlation functions of chiral primary operators and their superconformal descendants in the N=4 supersymmetric SU(N) Yang-Mills theory are studied in detail in a one-instanton background and at large N. Whereas earlier calculations were…
The exact solution of N=2 supersymmetric QCD found by Seiberg and Witten includes a prediction for all multi-instanton contributions to the low-energy dynamics. In the case where the matter hypermultiplets are massless, the leading…
This is a review of the QCD instanton vacuum. After introducing instantons and their physical meaning, I show that the number of instantons in the vacuum fluctuates in accordance with the QCD trace anomaly. The main properties of the…