Instanton-induced Inelastic Collisions in QCD

Abstract

We show that the instanton-induced inelastic processes, leading to multi-gluon production in in high-energy parton-parton scattering, are considerably enhanced over the quasi-elastic ones, by a factor of 100. The basic instanton-induced inelastic contribution cause the parton-parton cross section to increase as ${\rm ln} {s}$, and their Poisson resummation in hadron-hadron scattering yield a regge-type cross section. The pomeron slope and intercept due to instanton-induced contributions are evaluated. We show that the small intercept is due to the diluteness of the instantons in the QCD vacuum, while the small slope is related to the smallness of the instanton sizes.