Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking in the Bulk as a Localization Mechanism of Fields on the Brane

TL;DR

This paper investigates how spontaneous symmetry breaking in the bulk spacetime can serve as a mechanism to localize fields on a brane, with implications for high-energy physics and braneworld models.

Contribution

It demonstrates that bulk matter fields undergoing spontaneous symmetry breaking can induce field localization on the brane, highlighting a novel high-energy localization mechanism.

Findings

Bulk scalar fields can induce symmetry breaking on the brane.

Spontaneous symmetry breaking in the bulk aids in localizing fields on the brane.

The mechanism is effective at very high energies.

Abstract

We consider real and complex scalar fields non-minimally coupled to gravity in the bulk spacetime and study their impact on the brane upon acquiring a non-vanishing vacuum expectation value. When examining the case of the complex scalar field, a minimally coupled U(1) gauge field is also considered so that spontaneous symmetry breaking can take place. Particular attention is paid to the terms arising from the junction conditions, which act towards reinforcing the mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking. We find that the embedding of a braneworld universe in a bulk spacetime endowed with matter fields can induce this mechanism at very high energies, which implies the localization on the brane of the bulk fields.