Warped product spaces and geodesic motion in the neighbourhood of hypersurfaces

TL;DR

This paper analyzes geodesic motion of particles and photons in five-dimensional warped product spaces, revealing a natural, purely gravitational quasi-confinement mechanism that does not rely on brane-world models.

Contribution

It introduces a phase space analysis approach to understand particle confinement in warped spaces, discovering a novel oscillatory and neutrally stable confinement mode.

Findings

Identifies a natural oscillatory quasi-confinement of particles and photons.

Shows that warped product spaces satisfy Z2 symmetry locally by default.

Demonstrates confinement arises purely from classical gravitational effects.

Abstract

We study the classical geodesic motions of nonzero rest mass test particles and photons in five-dimensional warped product spaces. We show that it is possible to obtain a general picture of these motions, using the natural decoupling that occurs in such spaces between the motions in the fifth dimension and the motion in the hypersurfaces. This splitting allows the use of phase space analysis in order to investigate the possible confinement of particles and photons to hypersurfaces in five-dimensional warped product spaces. Using such analysis, we find a novel form of quasi-confinement which is oscillatory and neutrally stable. We also find that this class of warped product spaces locally satisfy the Z2 symmetry by default. The importance of such a confinement is that it is purely due to the classical gravitational effects, without requiring the presence of brane-type confinement mechanisms.