Anomalous dimensions of monopole operators in three-dimensional quantum electrodynamics

Abstract

The space of local operators in three-dimensional quantum electrodynamics contains monopole operators that create n units of gauge flux emanating from the insertion point. This paper uses the state-operator correspondence to calculate the anomalous dimensions of these monopole operators perturbatively to next-to-leading order in the 1/N[subscript f] expansion, thus improving on the existing leading-order results in the literature. Here, N[subscript f] is the number of two-component complex fermion flavors. The scaling dimension of the n = 1 monopole operator is 0.265N[subscript f] − 0.0383 + O(1/N[subscript f]) at the infrared conformal fixed point.