Universality and the magnetic catalysis of chiral symmetry breaking

Abstract

The hypothesis that the magnetic catalysis of chiral symmetry breaking is due to interactions of massless fermions in their lowest Landau level is examined in the context of chirally symmetric models with short ranged interactions. It is argued that, when the magnetic field is sufficiently large, even an infinitesimal attractive interaction in the appropriate channel will break chiral symmetry.

Comments: 24 pages, 6 figures, REVTeX. The final version with minor corrections. To appear in Phys Rev D60 (1999)