Effective field theory for magnetic compactifications

Abstract

Abstract Magnetic flux plays an important role in compactifications of field and string theories in two ways, it generates a multiplicity of chiral fermion zero modes and it can break supersymmetry. We derive the complete four-dimensional effective action for N $$ \mathcal{N} $$ = 1 supersymmetric Abelian and non-Abelian gauge theories in six dimensions compactified on a torus with flux. The effective action contains the tower of charged states and it accounts for the mass spectrum of bosonic and fermionic fields as well as their level-dependent interactions. This allows us to compute quantum corrections to the mass and couplings of Wilson lines. We find that the one-loop corrections vanish, contrary to the case without flux. This can be traced back to the spontaneous breaking of symmetries of the six-dimensional theory by the background gauge field, with the Wilson lines as Goldstone bosons.

Keywords

• Field Theories in Higher Dimensions
• Flux compactifications
• Supersymmetric Effective Theories