Instanton-induced inelastic collisions in QCD - art. no. 034008

We show that the instanton-induced inelastic processes, leading to multiglu on production in high-energy parton-parton scattering, are considerably enh anced (by a factor of 100) over the quasielastic ones. The basic instanton- induced inelastic contribution causes the parton-parton cross section to in crease 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 sl ope and intercept in the usual parametrization, which are evaluated. We sho w that the small intercept is due to the diluteness of the instantons in th e QCD vacuum, while the small size of the Pomeron (seen via its slope) is r elated to the smallness of the instanton sizes.