Nodes, monopoles and confinement in 2 + 1-dimensional gauge theories

In the presence of Chern-Simons interactions the wave functionals of physical states in 2 + 1-dimensional gauge theories vanish at a number of nodal points. We show that those nodes are located at some classical configurations which carry a non-trivial magnetic charge. In abelian gauge theories this fact explains why magnetic monopoles are suppressed by Chern-Simons interactions. In non-abelian theories it suggests a relevant role for nodal gauge field configurations in the confinement mechanism of Yang-Mills theories. We show that the vacuum nodes correspond to the chiral gauge orbits of reducible gauge fields with non-trivial magnetic monopole components.