Scale Anomaly Induced Instanton Interaction

Abstract

The binary interaction of large size instantons in a SU(2) Yang-Mills theory is obtained from the one-loop effective action for the field strength. The instanton interaction is calculated as a function of the instanton separation and in dependence on radius and relative orientation of the instantons. Two equally oriented instantons with radii large compared with the scale defined by the gluon condensate have purely attractive interaction, whereas the interaction of maximal disoriented instantons is repulsive. We argue that the medium range attractive interaction of the instantons generally holds and is solely due to the instability of the perturbative vacuum.