Relevance of a dilute instanton ensemble to light hadrons.

Abstract

We investigate the relevance of a dilute instanton ensemble to the masses and structure of light hadrons by using the lattice-cooling method to suppress all short-wavelength modes in the quenched QCD vacuum while leaving the well-separated instantons more or less intact. Our hadron model-independent results indicate that the masses and sizes of the pion, $\ensuremath{\rho}$, and nucleon are dominated by dilute-instanton configurations and insensitive to perturbative gluon exchange and confinement.