Vacuum structure of an eight-dimensional SU(3) gauge theory on a magnetized torus

Abstract

We analyze the vacuum structure of an eight-dimensional non-Abelian gauge theory with a compactified four-dimensional torus as the extra dimensions. As a nontrivial background configuration of the gauge field of an SU(n) gauge group, we suppose a magnetic flux in two extra dimensions, and continuous Wilson line phases are also involved. We introduce matter fields and calculate the mass spectrum of low-energy modes appearing in a four-dimensional effective theory in an SU(3) model as an explicit example. As expected, potentially tachyonic states in four-dimensional modes appear from extra-dimensional gauge fields that couple to the flux background since the gauge group is simply connected. The Wilson line phases give a nonvanishing contribution to their masses, and we have a low-energy mass spectrum without tachyonic states, given that these phases take an appropriate value. To verify the validity of the values of the Wilson line phases, we examine the one-loop effective potential for these phases and explicitly show the contribution from each type of field present in our model. It is clarified that, although there seems to be no local minimum in the potential for the Wilson line phases in the pure Yang-Mills case, by including matter fields, we could find a vacuum configuration where tachyonic states disappear. Published by the American Physical Society 2024