Yang-Mills and D-instantons

In this paper, which is written at an elementary and pedagogical level, we discuss general aspects of (single) instantons in SU(N) Yang-Mills theory, and then specialize to the case of N = 4 supersymmetry and the large-N limit. We show how to determine the measure of collective coordinates and compute instanton corrections to certain correlation functions. We then relate this to D-instantons in type IIB supergravity. By taking the D-instantons to live in an AdS₅×S⁵ background, we perform explicit checks of the AdS-CFT correspondence.