Nature of the deconfining phase transition in the 2+1-dimensional SU(N) Georgi-Glashow model

The nature of the deconfining phase transition in the 2+1-dimensional SU(N) Georgi-Glashow model is investigated. Within the dimensional-reduction hypothesis, the properties of the transition are described by a two-dimensional vectorial Coulomb gas models of electric and magnetic charges. The resulting critical properties are governed by a generalized SU(N) sine-Gordon model with self-dual symmetry. We show that this model displays a massless flow to an infrared fixed point which corresponds to the Z$_N$ parafermions conformal field theory. This result, in turn, supports the conjecture of Kogan, Tekin, and Kovner that the deconfining transition in the 2+1-dimensional SU(N) Georgi-Glashow model belongs to the Z$_N$ universality class.