Mini-Instantons

Abstract

It is shown that the inhomogeneous saddle points of scale invariant theories make the semiclassical expansion sensitive on the choice of non-renormalizable operators. In particular, the instanton fugacity and the beta function of the two dimensional non-linear sigma model depends on apparently non-renormalizable operators. This represents a non-perturbative breakdown of that concept of universality which is based on low dimensional operators.

25 pg. LPT-93-3