The thermal instanton determinant in compact form

Abstract

The thermal instanton determinant for the gauge group $SU(2)$ can be reduced to a form involving two simple functions. Various boundary conditions can easily incorporated. Only a two dimensional integral has to be done numerically. As an example we compute the contribution to the free energy of $\mathcal{N}=1$ theory.

Comments: 26 pages, 2 figures. This version contains a number of cosmetic improvements of the version appearing in PRD