Casimir effect in a 6D warped flux compactification model

TL;DR

This paper investigates the Casimir effect in a 6D warped flux compactification model, showing how quantum corrections can stabilize the volume modulus and address hierarchy and cosmological constant issues.

Contribution

It introduces a method to compute the Casimir effect in a 6D model and demonstrates stabilization of the volume modulus via one-loop quantum corrections.

Findings

The volume modulus is stabilized below a critical warping degree.

Quantum corrections can produce a tiny negative cosmological constant.

The model allows tuning of warping to achieve observed scale ratios.

Abstract

We discuss Casimir effect of a massless, minimally coupled scalar field in a 6D warped flux compactification model and its implications for the hierarchy and cosmological constant problems, which are longstanding puzzles in phenomenology and cosmology. Due to the scale invariance of the background theory, the 4D effective theory contains a volume modulus. To stabilize the modulus, we consider one-loop corrections to the effective potential by the Casimir effect. The one-loop effective potential for the volume modulus has a form which is very similar to Coleman-Weinberg potential. We evaluate coefficients appearing in the effective potential by employing zeta function regularization and heat kernel analysis. The volume modulus is stabilized for smaller degrees of warping, below a critical value, which depends on deficit angle of the reference brane. After stabilizing the modulus, it is possible to obtain observed values of the mass ratio between the fundamental energy scales and a tiny effective cosmological constant (though its sign is negative). The degree of warping should be tuned to be close to the critical value, not as severely as the original fine-tuning.