Exploring the Chiral Regime of QCD in the Interacting Instanton Liquid Model

The Interacting Instanton Liquid Model is used to explore the role of instanton induced dynamics in hadron structure. To support the validity of this model in the chiral regime, the quark mass dependencies of several properties are shown to agree with chiral perturbation theory, including the density of eigenmodes of the Dirac operator and the masses of the pion and nucleon. A quark mass m* = 80 MeV emerging naturally from the model is shown to specify the mass scale above which the fermion determinant is suppressed, the zero modes become subdominant, and the density of quasi-zero modes become independent of the quark mass.