Quark Propagation in the Random Instanton Vacuum

This is the first of a series of papers devoted to a systematic study of QCD correlation functions in a framework of 'instanton vacuum' models. The topic of this paper is to work out approximate formulae for quark propagators in a multi-instanton environment. As an application, and also as a necessary step toward understanding the correlation functions, we study the propagators of scalar and spinor quarks, using the simplest possible model, the so called 'random instanton vacuum' (RIV). Results related to heavy-light mesons, are found to be very consistent with phenomenology.