Various Properties of Compact QED and Confining Strings

TL;DR

This paper investigates how finite photon mass due to Debye screening affects properties of compact QED and confining strings, deriving new representations and analyzing low- and high-energy limits.

Contribution

It introduces a new representation of the partition function and a dual formulation of the Wilson loop, revealing differences in confining string behavior at various energy scales.

Findings

Partition function expressed as an integral over monopole densities.

Dual formulation yields a new theory of confining strings.

Confining string mass operator depends on observation volume.

Abstract

The effects bringing about by the finiteness of the photon mass due to the Debye screening in the monopole gas in three-dimensional compact QED are studied. In this respect, a representation of the partition function of this theory as an integral over monopole densities is derived. Dual formulation of the Wilson loop yields a new theory of confining strings, which in the low-energy limit almost coincides with the one corresponding to the case when the photon is considered to be massless, whereas in the high-energy limit these two theories are quite different from each other. The confining string mass operator in the low-energy limit is also found, and its dependence on the volume of observation is studied.