Dimensional reduction, magnetic flux strings, and domain walls Original Research Article

We study some consequences of dimensionally reducing systems with massless fermions and Abelian gauge fields from 3+1 to 2+1 dimensions. We first consider fermions in the presence of an external Abelian gauge field. In the reduced theory, obtained by compactifying one of the coordinates “a la Kaluza–Klein”, magnetic flux strings are mapped into domain wall defects. Fermionic zero modes, localized around the flux strings of the 3+1 dimensional theory, become also zero modes in the reduced theory, via the Callan and Harvey mechanism, and are concentrated around the domain wall defects. We also study a dynamical model: massless QED4, with fermions confined to a plane, deriving the effective action that describes the “planar” system.