Fermion mass-function in thermal QED3

Abstract

The gap equation for fermions in a version of thermal QED in three dimensions is studied numerically in the Schwinger-Dyson formalism. The interest in this theory has been recently revived since it has been proposed as a model of high-temperature superconductors. We include wave-function renormalization in our equations and use a non-bare vertex. We then have to solve a system of two integral equations by a relaxation algorithm. Fermion and photon self-energies varying independently with energy and momentum are used, which should produce more accurate results than in the previous literature. The behaviour of the theory with increasing temperature and number of fermion flavours is then carefully analyzed.