Type: Article
Publication Date: 2015-07-13
Citations: 27
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.92.025018
We use the Schwinger-Dyson equations in the presence of a thermal bath, in order to study chiral-symmetry breaking in a system of massless Dirac fermions interacting through pseudo quantum electrodynamics, in ($2+1$) dimensions. We show that there is a critical temperature ${T}_{c}$, below which chiral symmetry is broken, and a corresponding mass gap is dynamically generated, provided the coupling is above a certain, temperature dependent, critical value ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{c}$. The ratio between the energy gap and the critical temperature for this model is estimated to be $2\ensuremath{\pi}$. These results are confirmed by analytical and numerical investigations of the Schwinger-Dyson equation for the electron. In addition, we calculate the first finite-temperature corrections to the static Coulomb interaction. The relevance of this result in the realm of condensed matter systems, like graphene, is briefly discussed.