Instanton infra-red stabilization in the nonperturbative QCD vacuum

The influence of nonperturbative fields on instantons in quantum chromodynamics is studied. Nonperturbative vacuum is described in terms of nonlocal gauge invariant vacuum averages of gluon field strength. Effective action for instanton is derived in bilocal approximation and it is demonstrated that stochastic background gluon fields are responsible for infra-red (IR)stabilization of instantons. Comparison of obtained instanton size distribution with lattice data is made.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures. Talk given at 5th International Conference on Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum, Gargnano, Brescia, Italy, 10-14 Sep 200

Instanton IR stabilization in the nonperturbative confining vacuum

The influence of nonperturbative fields on instantons in quantum chromodynamics is studied. Nonperturbative vacuum is described in terms of nonlocal gauge invariant vacuum averages of gluon field strength. Effective action for instanton is derived in bilocal approximation and it is demonstrated that stochastic background gluon fields are responsible for infra-red (IR) stabilization of instantons. Dependence of characteristic instanton size on gluon condensate and correlation length in nonperturbative vacuum is found. It is shown that instanton size in QCD is of order of 0.25 fm. Comparison of obtained instanton size distribution with lattice data is made.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures; v2: minor corrections, to appear in JHE

Three-body Thomas-Ehrman shifts of analog states of 17^{17}Ne and 17^{17}N

The lowest-lying states of the Borromean nucleus $^{17}$Ne ($^{15}$O+$p$ + $p$) and its mirror nucleus $^{17}$N ($^{15}$N+$n$ + $n$) are compared by using the hyperspheric adiabatic expansion. Three-body resonances are computed by use of the complex scaling method. The measured size of $^{15}$O and the low-lying resonances of $^{16}$F ($^{15}$O+$p$) are first used as constraints to determine both central and spin-dependent two-body interactions. The interaction obtained reproduces relatively accurately both experimental three-body spectra. The Thomas-Ehrman shifts, involving excitation energy differences, are computed and found to be less than 3% of the total Coulomb energy shift for all states.Comment: 9 pages, 3 postscript figures, revtex style. To be published in Phys. Rev.