Tunneling between fermionic vacua and the overlap formalism

Abstract The probability amplitude for tunneling between the Dirac vacua corresponding to different signs of a parity breaking fermionic mass M in 2 + 1 dimensions is studied, making contact with the continuum overlap formulation for chiral determinants. It is shown that the transition probability in the limit when M → ∞ corresponds, via the overlap formalism, to the squared modulus of a chiral determinant in two Euclidean dimensions. The transition probabilities corresponding to two particular examples: fermions on a torus with twisted boundary conditions, and fermions on a plane in the presence of an external perturbative gauge field are evaluated.