Exact analysis of Coulomb gauge vacuum degeneracies in (2 + 1) dimensions

The solutions of the two-dimensional euclidean σ-model provide an infinite number of pure gauge field configurations satisfying the Coulomb gauge condition, in (2 + 1) dimensions. For vacuum gauge fields associated with finite action instanton solutions of the σ-model, we find that the winding number n configuration leads to n negative eigenvalues for the ghost operator, up to a finite calculable degeneracy.