The QCD vacuum as an instanton liquid

Abstract

We review recent progress in understanding the importance of instanton effects in QCD. Instantons provide a mechanism for quark and gluon condensation, explain the U(1)A anomaly and the appearance of a non-perturbative vacuum energy density. In the framework of the instanton liquid model, a large number of hadronic correlation functions were calculated. The results are in good agreement with both experimental data and lattice simulations. We also review recent results on the phase structure of QCD-like theories. Instantons provide a mechanism for chiral symmetry restoration at finite temperature (or for a large number of quark flavors) connected with the formation of instanton-anti-instanton molecules.