Confinement from Instantons or Merons

Abstract

In contrast to ensembles of singular gauge instantons, which are well known to fail to produce confinement, it is shown that effective theories based on ensembles of merons or regular gauge instantons do produce confinement. Furthermore, when the scale is set by the string tension, the action density, topological susceptibility, and glueball masses are similar to those arising in lattice QCD.