Precise Quark-Mass Dependence of the Instanton Determinant

Abstract

The fermion determinant in an instanton background for a quark field of arbitrary mass is determined exactly using an efficient numerical method to evaluate the determinant of a partial-wave radial differential operator. The bare sum over partial waves is divergent but can be renormalized in the minimal subtraction scheme using the result of WKB analysis of the large partial-wave contribution. Previously, only a few leading terms in the extreme small and large mass limits were known for the corresponding effective action. Our approach works for any quark-mass and interpolates smoothly between the analytically known small and large mass expansions.