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 ZN 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 ZN universality class.