Consistent image Pauli reduction of six-dimensional chiral gauged Einstein–Maxwell supergravity Original Research Article

Six-dimensional image Einstein–Maxwell gauged supergravity is known to admit a (Minkowski)4×S2 vacuum solution with four-dimensional image chiral supersymmetry. The massless sector comprises a supergravity multiplet, an image Yang–Mills vector multiplet, and a scalar multiplet. In this paper it is shown that, remarkably, the six-dimensional theory admits a fully consistent dimensional reduction on the 2-sphere, implying that all solutions of the four-dimensional image supergravity can be lifted back to solutions in six dimensions. This provides a striking realisation of the idea, first proposed by Pauli, of obtaining a theory that includes Yang–Mills fields by dimensional reduction on a coset space. We address the cosmological constant problem within this model, and argue that, contrary to recent suggestions, fine-tuning is still required. We also suggest a link between a modification of the model with 3-branes, and a five-dimensional model based on an image orbifold.