Cooling is used as a filter on a set of gluon fields sampling the Wilson action to selectively remove essentially all fluctuations of the gluon field except for the instantons. The close agreement between quenched lattice QCD results with cooled and uncooled configurations for vacuum correlation functions of hadronic currents and for density-density correlation functions in hadronic bound states provides strong evidence for the dominant role of instantons in determining light hadron structure and quark propagation in the QCD vacuum.

Point-to-point vacuum correlation functions for spatially separated hadron currents are calculated in quenched lattice QCD on a 16 3 × 24 lattice with 6/g 2 = 5.7. The lattice data are analyzed in terms of dispersion relations, which enable us to extract physical information from small distances where asymptotic freedom is apparent to large distances where the hadronic resonances dominate. In the pseudoscalar, vector, and axial vector channels where experimental data or phenomenological information are available, semiquantitative agreement is obtained. In the nucleon and delta channels, where no experimental data exist, our lattice data complement experiments. Comparison with approximations based on sum rules and interacting instantons are made, and technical details of the lattice calculation are described.

Point-to-point correlation functions of hadron currents in the QCD vacuum are calculated on a lattice and analyzed using dispersion relations, providing physical information down to small spatial separations. Qualitative agreement with phenomenological results is obtained in channels for which experimental data are available, and these correlation functions are shown to be useful in exploring approximations based on sum rules and interacting instantons.PACS numbers: 12.38.Gc