Insight into Hadron Structure from Lattice QCD

Abstract

A variety of evidence from lattice QCD is presented revealing the dominant role of instantons in the propagation of light quarks in the QCD vacuum and in light hadron structure. The instanton content of lattice gluon configurations is extracted, and observables calculated from the instantons alone are shown to agree well with those calculated using all gluons. The lowest 128 eigenfunctions of the Dirac operator are calculated and shown to exhibit zero modes localized at the instantons. Finally, the zero mode contributions to the quark propagator alone are shown to account for essentially the full strength of the rho and pion resonances in the vector and pseudoscalar correlation functions.