Classical Gauge Instantons From Open Strings

We study the D3/D(-1) brane system and show how to compute instanton corrections to correlation functions of gauge theories in four dimensions using open string techniques. In particular we show that the disks with mixed boundary conditions that are typical of the D3/D(-1) system are the sources for the classical instanton solution. This can then be recovered from simple calculations of open string scattering amplitudes in the presence of D-instantons. Exploiting this fact we also relate this stringy description to the standard instanton calculus of field theory.