Chiral symmetry breaking in QED₃ in presence of irrelevant interactions: a renormalization group study

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Motivated by recent theoretical approaches to high temperature superconductivity, we study dynamical mass generation in three dimensional quantum electrodynamics QED₃) in presence of irrelevant four-fermion quartic terms. The problem is reformulated in terms of the renormalization group flows of certain four-fermion couplings and charge, and then studied in the limit of large number of fermion flavors N. We find that the critical number of fermions Nc below which the mass becomes dynamically generated depends continuously on a weak chiral-symmetry-breaking interaction. One-loop calculation in our gauge-invariant approach yields Nc₀ = 6 in pure QED₃. We also find that chiral-symmetry-preserving mass cannot become dynamically generated in pure QED₃.