Instantons and Glueballs

We investigate the impact of instantons on scalar glueball properties in a largely model-independent analytical approach based on the instanton-improved operator product expansion (IOPE) of the $0^{++}$ glueball correlator. The instanton contributions turn out to be dominant, to substantially improve the consistency of the correponding QCD sum rules, and to increase the glueball residue about fivefold.