Pauli reductions of supergravities in six and five dimensions

The dimensional reduction of a generic theory on a curved internal space such as a sphere does not admit a consistent truncation to a finite set of fields that includes the Yang-Mills gauge bosons of the isometry group. In rare cases, e.g., the $S^7$ reduction of 11-dimensional supergravity, such a consistent “Pauli reduction” does exist. In this paper, we study this existence question in two examples of $S^2$ reductions of supergravities. We do this by making use of a relation between certain $S^2$ reductions and group manifold $S^3=SU(2)$ reductions of a theory in one dimension higher. By this means, we establish the nonexistence of a consistent $S^2$ Pauli reduction of five-dimensional minimal supergravity. We also show that a previously discovered consistent Pauli reduction of six-dimensional Salam-Sezgin supergravity can be elegantly understood via a group-manifold reduction from seven dimensions.