Various Properties of Compact QED and Confining Strings

Abstract

The effects bringing about by the finiteness of the photon mass due to the Debye screening in the monopole gas in three-dimensional compact QED are studied. In this respect, a representation of the partition function of this theory as an integral over monopole densities is derived. Dual formulation of the Wilson loop yields a new theory of confining strings, which in the low-energy limit almost coincides with the one corresponding to the case when the photon is considered to be massless, whereas in the high-energy limit these two theories are quite different from each other. The confining string mass operator in the low-energy limit is also found, and its dependence on the volume of observation is studied.Comment: 7 pages, LaTeX, no figures, 1 reference is added, final version to appear in Phys. Lett.