The contribution of nontrivial vacuum (topological) excitations, more specifically vortex configurations of the self-dual Chern-Simons-Higgs model, to the functional partition function is considered. By using a duality transformation, we arrive at a representation of the partition function in terms of which explicit vortex degrees of freedom are coupled to a dual gauge field. By matching the obtained action to a field theory for the vortices, the physical properties of the model in the presence of vortex excitations are then studied. In terms of this field theory for vortices in the self-dual Chern-Simons Higgs model, we determine the location of the critical value for the Chern-Simons parameter below which vortex condensation can happen in the system. The effects of self-energy quantum corrections to the vortex field are also considered.

We determine the contribution of nontrivial vacuum (topological) excitations, more specifically vortex-strings of the Abelian Higgs model in 3 + 1 dimensions, to the functional partition function. By expressing the original action in terms of dual transformed fields we make explicit in the equivalent action the contribution of the vortex-strings excitations of the model. The effective potential of an appropriately defined local vacuum expectation value of the vortex-string field in the dual transformed action is then evaluated both at zero and finite temperatures and its properties discussed in the context of the finite temperature phase transition.

Quantum electrodynamics (QED) of electrons confined in a plane and that yet can undergo interactions mediated by an unconstrained photon has been described by the so-called pseudo-QED (PQED), the (2+1)-dimensional version of the equivalent dimensionally reduced original QED. In this work, we show that PQED with a nonlocal Chern-Simons term is dual to the Chern-Simons Higgs model at the quantum level. We apply the path-integral formalism in the dualization of the Chern-Simons Higgs model to first describe the interaction between quantum vortex particle excitations in the dual model. This interaction is explicitly shown to be in the form of a Bessel-like type of potential in the static limit. This result per se opens exciting possibilities for investigating topological states of matter generated by interactions, since the main difference between our new model and the PQED is the presence of a nonlocal Chern-Simons action. Indeed, the dual transformation yields an unexpected square root of the d'Alembertian operator, namely, ( √ − ) −1 multiplied by the well-known Chern-Simons action. Despite the nonlocality, the resulting model is still gauge invariant and preserves the unitarity, as we explicitly prove. Finally, when coupling the resulting model to Dirac fermions, we then show that pairs of bounded electrons are expected to appear, with a typical distance between the particles being inversely proportional to the topologically generated mass for the gauge field in the dual model.

The coefficient of the Chern-Simons term in the effective action for massive Dirac fermions in three dimensions is computed by using the point-splitting regularization method. We show that in this framework no ambiguities arise. This is related to the fact that the point-splitting regularization does not introduce additional parity breaking effects, implementing one possible physical criterion in order to uniquely characterize the system.