The Weak Parity-Violating Pion-Nucleon Coupling (Revised)

We use QCD sum rules to obtain the weak parity-violating pion-nucleon coupling constant $f_{\pi NN}$. We find that $f_{\pi NN}\approx 2\times 10^{-8}$, about an order of magnitude smaller than the ``best estimates'' based on quark models. This result follows from the cancellation between perturbative and nonperturbative QCD processes not found in quark models, but explicit in the QCD sum rule method. Our result is consistent with the experimental upper limit found from $^{18}$F parity-violating measurements.