General Embedded Brane Effective Field Theories

TL;DR

This paper introduces a broad class of four-dimensional effective field theories derived from higher-dimensional brane models, generalizing the Galileon theory and offering potential applications in cosmology.

Contribution

It develops a new framework for effective field theories from embedded branes, extending the Galileon model with diverse structures and symmetries.

Findings

New class of EFTs with global symmetries from higher-dimensional branes

Existence of scalar potentials with protected small masses

Relevance to early and late universe cosmology

Abstract

We present a new general class of four-dimensional effective field theories with interesting global symmetry groups. These theories arise from purely gravitational actions for (3+1)-dimensional branes embedded in higher dimensional spaces with induced gravity terms. The simplest example is the well known Galileon theory, with its associated Galilean symmetry, arising as the limit of a DGP brane world. However, we demonstrate that this is a special case of a much wider range of theories, with varying structures, but with the same attractive features such as second order equations. In some circumstances, these new effective field theories allow potentials for the scalar fields on curved space, with small masses protected by non-linear symmetries. Such models may prove relevant to the cosmology of both the early and late universe.