Massless Fermions and the Instanton Dipole Liquid in Compact QED_3

Abstract

We study the consequences of including parity preserving matter for the effective dual theory corresponding to compact QED_3; in particular we focus on the effect of that contribution on the confinement-deconfinement properties of the system. To that end, we compare two recent proposals when massless fermions are included, both based on an effective anomalous dual model, but having global and local Z_2 symmetries, respectively. We present a detailed analysis to show that while for large mass fermions the global Z_2 symmetry is preferred, in the massless fermion case the local Z_2 scenario turns out to be the proper one. We present a detailed discussion about how the inclusion of massless fermions in compact QED_3 leads to deconfinement, and discuss the stability of the deconfined phase by introducing a description based on an instanton dipole liquid picture.