Instabilities of the chiral-symmetry-breaking ground state in a truncation-free expansion

We use the composite-field effective-action method to examine the stability of the chiral-symmetry-breaking vacua in a QED-like model of interacting fermion fields. Unlike most of the existing approaches, ours does not rely on the truncated Baker-Johnson-Willey expansion. Instead, we break the hierarchy of the Dyson-Schwinger equations by the requirement that the vertex function is dominated by the contributions from the vicinity of the mass shell of the exchanged gluon and that it explicitly satisfies the Ward identity. The composite-field effective potential is then expanded in terms of the eigenfunctions of the Bethe-Salpeter equation. The signature of the second derivatives of the effective potential shows that the broken-symmetry vacua are unstable