  The confinement problem remains one of the most difficult problems in
theoretical physics. An important step toward the solution of this problem is
the Polyakov's work on abelian confinement. The Georgi-Glashow model is a
natural testing ground for this mechanism which has been surprising us by its
richness and wide applicability. In this work, we shed light on two new aspects
of this model in 2+1 D. First, we develop a many-body description of the
effective degrees of freedom. Namely, we consider a non-relativistic gas of
W-bosons in the background of monopole-instanton plasma. Many-body treatment is
a standard toolkit in condensed matter physics. However, we add a new twist by
supplying the monopole-instantons as external background field. Using this
construction, we calculate the exact form of the potential between two electric
probes as a function of their separation. This potential is expressed in terms
of the Meijer-G function which interpolates between logarithmic and linear
behavior at small and large distances, respectively. Second, we develop a
systematic approach to integrate out the effect of the W-bosons at finite
temperature in the range 0<T<M_W, where M_W is the W-boson mass, starting from
the full relativistic partition function of the Georgi-Glashow model. Using a
heat kernel expansion that takes into account the non-trivial thermal holonomy,
we show that the partition function describes a three-dimensional two-component
Coulomb gas. We repeat our analysis using the many-body description which
yields the same result and provides a check on our formalism. At temperatures
close to the deconfinement temperature, the gas becomes essentially
two-dimensional recovering the partition function of the dual sine-Gordon model
that was considered in a previous work.
