Instanton-Driven Saturation at Small x

Abstract

We report on the interesting possibility of instanton-driven gluon saturation in lepton-nucleon scattering at small Bjorken-x. Our results crucially involve non-perturbative information from high-quality lattice simulations. The conspicuous, intrinsic instanton size scale < rho > ~ 0.5 fm, as known from the lattice, turns out to determine the saturation scale. A central result is the identification of the ``colour glass condensate'' with the QCD-sphaleron state.