Photons and Fermions in Spacetime with a Compactified Spatial Dimension

Abstract

The effects of a nonsimply connected spacetime with the topology of $S^{1}\times R^{3}$ in the vacua of QED and gauged-NJL theories are investigated. It is shown that the polarization effects of twisted and untwisted fermions in QED are equivalent, once the corresponding stable vacuum solution of each fermion class is taken into account. The photon propagation in QED is found to be anisotropic and characterized by several massive photon modes and a superluminal transverse mode. At small compactification radius the masses of the massive modes increase as the inverse of the radius, while the massless photon mode has a superluminal velocity that increases logarithmically with that distance. At low energies the photon masses lead to an effective confinement of the gauge fields into a $(2+1)-$dimensional manifold transverse to the compactified direction. In the gauged-NJL model, it is shown that for both twisted and untwisted fermions, the smaller the compactification radius, the larger the critical four-fermion coupling needed to generate a fermion-antifermion chiral symmetry breaking condensate.