Fermion zero modes in N=2 supervortices -: art. no. 065006

We study the fermionic zero modes of BPS semilocal magnetic vortices in N=2 supersymmetric QED with a Fayet-Iliopoulos term and two matter hypermultiplets of opposite charge. There is a one-parameter family of vortices with arbitrarily wide magnetic cores. Contrary to the situation in pure Nielsen-Olesen vortices, new zero modes are found which get their masses from Yukawa couplings to scalar fields that do not wind and are nonzero at the core. We clarify the relation between fermion mass and zero modes. The new zero modes have opposite chiralities and therefore do not affect the net counting (left minus right) of zero modes coming from index theorems but do manage to evade other index theorems in the literature that count the total number (left plus right) of zero modes in simpler systems.