ANYON MEAN FIELD AS A CRITICAL-FIELD THEORY

We discuss an abelian gauge theory in 2+1 dimensions, the gauge field being coupled to nonrelativistic fermions. The action for the gauge field is a combination of the Maxwell term and a Chern-Simons (CS) term. We study the limit of vanishing fermion' charge, keeping fixed the gauge-field mass induced by the CS term. By considering a closed surface, in particular a torus to keep translational invariance, we show that the fermions do not decouple completely from the gauge field, and in fact we find that they behave as anyons treated in the - translationally invariant formulation of the - mean-field approximation. © 1992.