Physics – High Energy Physics – High Energy Physics - Theory
Scientific paper
2002-06-06
JHEP 0211 (2002) 049
Physics
High Energy Physics
High Energy Physics - Theory
24 pages, latex. v2: a reference to prior work has been added
Scientific paper
10.1088/1126-6708/2002/11/049
Many abelian gauge theories in three dimensions flow to interacting conformal field theories in the infrared. We define a new class of local operators in these conformal field theories which are not polynomial in the fundamental fields and create topological disorder. They can be regarded as higher-dimensional analogues of twist and winding-state operators in free 2d CFTs. We call them monopole operators for reasons explained in the text. The importance of monopole operators is that in the Higgs phase, they create Abrikosov-Nielsen-Olesen vortices. We study properties of these operators in three-dimensional QED using large N_f expansion. In particular, we show that monopole operators belong to representations of the conformal group whose primaries have dimension of order N_f. We also show that monopole operators transform non-trivially under the flavor symmetry group, with the precise representation depending on the value of the Chern-Simons coupling.
Borokhov Vadim
Kapustin A. A.
Wu Xinkai
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