Instanton-induced inelastic collisions in QCD

We show that the instanton-induced inelastic processes, leading to multigluon production in high-energy parton-parton scattering, are considerably enhanced (by a factor of 100) over the quasielastic ones. The basic instanton-induced inelastic contribution causes the parton-parton cross section to increase as Ins, due to prompt production of multigluon clusters of mass 2-3 GeV close to QCD sphalerons. The cross section is related to the Pomeron slope and intercept in the usual parametrization, which are evaluated. We show that the small intercept is due to the diluteness of the instantons in the QCD vacuum, while the small size of the Pomeron (seen via its slope) is related to the smallness of the instanton sizes.