The calculus of many instantons

We describe the modern formalism, ideas and applications of the instanton calculus for gauge theories with, and without, supersymmetry. Particular emphasis is put on developing a formalism that can deal with any number of instantons. This necessitates a thorough review of the ADHM construction of instantons with arbitrary charge and an in-depth analysis of the resulting moduli space of solutions. We review the construction of the ADHM moduli space as a hyper-Kähler quotient. We show how the functional integral in the semi-classical approximation reduces to an integral over the instanton moduli space in each instanton sector and how the resulting matrix partition function involves various geometrical quantities on the instanton moduli space: volume form, connection, curvature, isometries, etc. One important conclusion is that this partition function is the dimensional reduction of a higher-dimensional gauged linear sigma model which naturally leads us to describe the relation of the instanton calculus to D-branes in string theory. Along the way we describe powerful applications of the calculus of many instantons to supersymmetric gauge theories including (i) the gluino condensate puzzle in N=1 theories (ii) Seiberg–Witten theory in N=2 theories; and (iii) the AdS/CFT correspondence in N=2 and 4 theories. Finally, we brielfy review the modifications of the instanton calculus for a gauge theory defined on a non-commutative spacetime and we also describe a new method for calculating instanton processes using a form of localization on the instanton moduli space.