EXPLORING CONFINEMENT BY COOLING - A STUDY OF COMPACT 3-DIMENSIONAL QED

The role of monopoles in the confining behavior of compact lattice thr ee-dimensional QED (QED3) is studied using an adiabatic cooling method . Monopole-antimonopole pairs with a large separation survive cooling and presence or absence of such plasma monopoles provides a useful cla ssification of the lattice gauge-field configurations at large beta. B y calculating observables in subsets of gauge-field configurations whi ch contain or do not contain plasma monopoles it is seen that, in comp act QED3, monopoles dominate the long-distance physics, e.g., the stri ng tension, linear confining potential, and dynamical mass generation. On the other hand, the spin-spin interaction is essentially unaffecte d by monopoles.