Screening of instantons in the quark gas

The grand partition function of quark matter is developed about an arbitrary classical gauge field configuration in a systematic weak coupling expansion. In the presence of a finite density massless quark gas the instanton induced effective quark interaction is modified by a factor exp?2N_F(ω?)²], i.e. the baryon number chemical potential μ acts as an intrinsic infrared cutoff on the instanton scale size ?. The equation of state of the quark matter is also briefly discussed.