VECTOR SCHWINGER MODEL WITH A PHOTON MASS TERM: GAUGE-INVARIANT REFORMULATION, OPERATOR SOLUTIONS AND HAMILTONIAN AND PATH INTEGRAL FORMULATIONS
We consider the vector Schwinger model (VSM) describing two-dimensional electrodynamics with massless fermions, where the left-handed and right-handed fermions are coupled to the electromagnetic field with equal couplings, with a mass term for the U(1) gauge field and then study its operator solutions and the Hamiltonian and path integral formulations. We emphasize here that although the VSM has been studied in the literature rather widely but only without a photon mass term (which was a consequence of demanding the regularization for the VSM to be gauge-invariant (GI)). The VSM with a photon mass term is seen to be a gauge-noninvariant (GNI) theory. Using the standard Stueckelberg formalism we then construct a GI theory corresponding to the proposed GNI model. From this reformulated GI theory, we further recover the physical contents of the proposed GNI theory under a very special gauge choice. The theory proposed and studied here presents a new class of models in the two-dimensional quantum electrodynamics with massless fermions but with a photon mass term.