Screening in three-dimensional QED with arbitrary fermion mass

TL;DR

This paper calculates the quark-antiquark potential in 3D massive QED for any fermion mass, revealing screening effects across all masses and validating approximation methods through numerical analysis.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of screening in 3D massive QED for arbitrary fermion masses, extending previous large-mass results.

Findings

Screening occurs for all fermion masses, contrary to classical expectations.

Classical behavior is recovered at small quark separations.

Numerical analysis confirms the validity of approximation schemes.

Abstract

We compute the quark--antiquark potential in three dimensional massive Quantum Electrodynamics for arbitrary fermion mass. The result indicates that screening prevails for any quark masses, contrary to the classical expectations, generalizing our previous result obtained for large masses. We also test the validity of several approximation schemes using a detailed numerical analysis. The classical result is still reproduced for small separation of the quarks.