Zero Modes of Massive Fermions Delocalize from Axion Strings - Hengameh Bagherian (Harvard)

Abstract: Massless chiral excitations can arise from the interactions between a fermion and an axion string, propagating along the string and allowing it to superconduct. The properties of these excita- tions, or zero modes, dictate how the string interacts with light and can thus have important phenomenological consequences. In this paper, we add a nowhere-vanishing Dirac mass for the fermion in the usual model of axion electrodynamics. We find that the zero modes exhibit an in- teresting phase structure in which they delocalize from the string’s core as the mass increases, up until a critical value past which they disappear. We study this structure from an analytic perspec- tive, with explicit numerical solutions, and via anomaly inflow arguments. Finally, we derive the two-dimensional effective theory of the zero mode and its interactions with the four-dimensional gauge field and show how this effective theory breaks down as the zero modes delocalize.

Based on: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.01476.pdf