The neutron electric dipole moment in the instanton vacuum: quenched versus unquenched simulations.

We investigate the role played by the fermionic determinant in the evaluation of the CP-violating neutron electric dipole moment (EDM) adopting the Instanton Liquid Model. Significant differences between quenched and unquenched calculations are found. In the case of unquenched simulations the neutron EDM decreases linearly with the quark mass and is expected to vanish in the chiral limit. On the contrary, within the quenched approximation, the neutron EDM increases as the quark mass decreases and is expected to diverge as 1/m_Nf in the chiral limit. We argue that such a qualitatively different behavior is a parameter-free, semiclassical prediction and occurs because the neutron EDM is sensitive to the topological structure of the vacuum. The present analysis suggests that quenched and unquenched lattice QCD simulations of the neutron EDM as well as of other observables governed by topology might show up important differences in the quark mass dependence for mq <= Lambda QCD