Instanton-Induced Processes - An Overview

Abstract

A first part of this review is devoted to a summary of our extensive studies of the discovery potential for instanton(I)-induced, deep-inelastic processes at HERA. Included are some key issues about I-perturbation theory, an exploitation of crucial lattice constraints and a status report about the recent I-search results by the HERA collaborations H1 and ZEUS in relation to our predictions. Next follows a brief outline of an ongoing project concerning a broad exploration of the discovery potential for hard instanton processes at the LHC. I then turn to an overview of our work on high-energy processes, involving larger-sized instantons. I shall mainly focus on the phenomenon of saturation at small Bjorken-x from an instanton perspective. In such a framework, the saturation scale is associated with the conspicuous average instanton size (~0.5 fm), as known from lattice simulations. Another central and intriguing result is the identification of the "Colour Glass Condensate" with the QCD sphaleron state.