Exploring confinement by cooling: A study of compact QED$_3$

The role of monopoles in the confining behavior of compact lattice $QED_3$ is studied using an adiabatic cooling method. Monopole-antimonopole pairs with large separation suvive cooling and the presence or absence of such plasma monopoles provides a useful classification of the lattice gauge field configurations at large $\beta$. By calculating observables in subsets of gauge field configurations which contain or do not contain plasma monopoles it is seen that, in compact $QED_3$, monopoles dominate the long distance physics, e.g., the string tension, linear confining potential and dynamical mass generation. On the other hand, the spin-spin interaction is essentially unaffected by monopoles.