de Sitter Branes in a Flat Bulk of Massive Gravity

TL;DR

This paper constructs de Sitter branes within a flat five-dimensional massive gravity framework, revealing two solution branches with unique properties, including conditions for localized gravity and potential gauge symmetry protections.

Contribution

It introduces new de Sitter brane solutions in flat 5D massive gravity, exploring their properties, tensions, and the conditions for localized massless gravitons, extending to bigravity scenarios.

Findings

Two solution branches with distinct properties.

Existence of sub-branches where tension effects cancel.

Support for localized 4D massless graviton under specific conditions.

Abstract

We construct de Sitter branes in a flat bulk of massive gravity in $5D$. We find two branches of solutions, reminiscent of the normal and self-accelerating branches in DGP, but with rather different properties. Neither branch has a self-accelerating limit: the background geometry requires having a nonvanishing tension. On the other hand, on both branches there are sub-branches where the leading order contributions of the tension to the curvature cancel. In these cases it turns out that larger tensions curve the background less. Further, both branches support a localized $4D$ massless graviton for a special choice of bulk mass terms. This choice may be protected by enhanced gauge symmetry at least at the linearized level. Finally, we generalize the solutions to the case of bigravity in a flat $5D$ bulk.