Instanton-driven Gluon Saturation

Abstract

We report on the interesting possibility of instanton-driven gluon saturation in lepton-nucleon scattering at small Bjorken-x. The explicitly known instanton gauge field serves as a concrete realization of an underlying non-perturbative saturation mechanism associated with strong classical fields. The conspicuous, intrinsic instanton size scale known from lattice simulations, turns out to determine the saturation scale. The ``colour glass condensate'' can be identified in our approach with the QCD-sphaleron state, dominating instanton-induced processes in the softer regime.