Scalar gluonium and instantons

The impact of QCD instantons on scalar glueball properties is studied in the framework of an instanton-improved operator product expansion (IOPE) for the 0⁺⁺ glueball correlation function. Direct instanton contributions are found to strongly dominate over those from perturbative fluctuations and soft vacuum fields. All IOPE sum rules, including the one involving a subtraction constant, show a high degree of stability and are, in contrast to previous glueball sum rules, consistent with the low-energy theorem for the zero-momentum correlator. The predicted glueball mass mG=1.53±0.2 GeV is less sensitive to the instanton contributions then the glueball coupling (residue) fG=1.01±0.25 GeV, which increases by about half an order of magnitude. Both glueball properties are shown to obey scaling relations as a function of the average instanton size and density.