English

Quantum Electrodynamics in d=3 from the epsilon-expansion

High Energy Physics - Theory 2016-04-06 v2 Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

We study Quantum Electrodynamics in d=3 (QED_3) coupled to N_f flavors of fermions. The theory flows to an IR fixed point for N_f larger than some critical number N_f^c. For N_f<= N_f^c, chiral-symmetry breaking is believed to take place. In analogy with the Wilson-Fisher description of the critical O(N) models in d=3, we make use of the existence of a perturbative fixed point in d=4-2epsilon to study the three-dimensional conformal theory. We compute in perturbation theory the IR dimensions of fermion bilinear and quadrilinear operators. For small N_f, a quadrilinear operator can become relevant in the IR and destabilize the fixed point. Therefore, the epsilon-expansion can be used to estimate N_f^c. An interesting novelty compared to the O(N) models is that the theory in d=3 has an enhanced symmetry due to the structure of 3d spinors. We identify the operators in d=4-2epsilon that correspond to the additional conserved currents at d=3 and compute their infrared dimensions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1508.06278,
  title  = {Quantum Electrodynamics in d=3 from the epsilon-expansion},
  author = {Lorenzo Di Pietro and Zohar Komargodski and Itamar Shamir and Emmanuel Stamou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1508.06278},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

6 pages, 3 figures. v2: references added, minor corrections

R2 v1 2026-06-22T10:41:25.219Z