Direct instantons and nucleon magnetic moments

We calculate the leading direct-instanton contributions to the operator product expansion of the nucleon correlator in a magnetic background field and set up improved QCD sum rules for the nucleon magnetic moments. Remarkably, the instanton contributions are found to affect only those sum rules which had previously been considered unstable. The new sum rules show good stability and reproduce the experimental values of the nucleon magnetic moments with values of χ, the quark condensate magnetic susceptibility, consistent with other estimates.