Chiral symmetry breaking and confinement beyond rainbow-ladder truncation

A nonperturbative construction of the 3-point fermion-boson vertex which obeys its Ward-Takahashi or Slavnov-Taylor identity, ensures the massless fermion and boson propagators transform according to their local gauge covariance relations, reproduces perturbation theory in the weak coupling regime and provides a gauge independent description for dynamical chiral symmetry breaking and confinement has been a long-standing goal in physically relevant gauge theories such as quantum electrodynamics (QED) and quantum chromodynamics. In this paper, we demonstrate that the same simple and practical form of the vertex can achieve these objectives not only in 4-dimensional quenched QED but also in its 3-dimensional counterpart. Employing this convenient form of the vertex ansatz into the Schwinger-Dyson equation for the fermion propagator, we observe that it renders the critical coupling in 4-dimensional quenched QED markedly gauge independent in contrast with the bare vertex and improves on the well-known Curtis-Pennington construction. Furthermore, our proposal yields gauge independent order parameters for confinement and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking in 3-dimensional quenched QED.