Computing the effective Hamiltonian of low-energy vacuum gauge fields

A standard approach to investigate the nonperturbative QCD dynamics is through vacuum models which emphasize the role played by specific gauge field fluctuations, such as instantons, monopoles, or vortexes. The effective Hamiltonian describing the dynamics of the low-energy degrees of freedom in such approaches is usually postulated phenomenologically, or obtained through uncontrolled approximations. In a recent paper, we have shown how lattice field theory simulations can be used to rigorously compute the effective Hamiltonian of arbitrary vacuum models by stochastically performing the path integral over all the vacuum field fluctuations which are not explicitly taken into account. In this work, we present the first illustrative application of such an approach to a gauge theory and we use it to compute the instanton size distribution in SU(2) gluon dynamics in a fully model independent and parameter-free way.