Gauge Invariant Effective Potential for Abelian Maxwell-Chern-Simons Systems

We investigate the effective potential for Abelian Maxwell--Chern--Simons systems. The calculations follow an alternate approach, recently proposed as a gauge invariant formulation of the effective potential, constructed in terms of a gauge invariant order parameter. We compare the results with another investigation, obtained within a standard route of calculating the effective potential.Comment: 10 pages. Revtex. To appear in Phys. Rev.