Vacuum Stability for Dirac Fermions in Three Dimensions

Abstract

I investigate three dimensional abelian and non-abelian gauge theories interacting with Dirac fermions. Using a variational method I evaluate the vacuum energy density in the one-loop approximation. It turns out that the states with a constant magnetic condensate lie below the perturbative ground state only in the case of three dimensional quantum electrodynamics with massive fermions.

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