Bulk Gravitational Field and Cosmological Perturbations on the Brane

TL;DR

This paper studies how the gravitational field in the higher-dimensional bulk affects cosmological perturbations on a brane, revealing new correction types that influence structure formation and cosmic microwave background observations.

Contribution

It derives effective 4D Einstein equations incorporating bulk gravitational effects and identifies two novel correction types impacting cosmological perturbations.

Findings

Bulk gravitational corrections become significant at small scales and high energies.

Induced matter perturbations behave as sound waves with velocity 1/√3.

Dark radiation perturbations cause observable shifts in CMB acoustic peaks.

Abstract

We investigate the effect of the bulk gravitational field on the cosmological perturbations on a brane embedded in the 5D Anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime. The effective 4D Einstein equations for the scalar cosmological perturbations on the brane are obtained by solving the perturbations in the bulk. Then the behaviour of the corrections induced by the bulk gravitational field to the conventional 4D Einstein equation are determined. Two types of the corrections are found. First we investigate the corrections which become significant at scales below the AdS curvature scales and in the high energy universe with the energy density larger than the tension of the brane. The evolution equation for the perturbations on the brane is found and solved. Another type of the corrections is induced on the brane if we consider the bulk perturbations which do not contribute to the metric perturbations but do contribute to the matter perturbations. At low energies, they have imaginary mass $m^2=-(2/3) \k^2$ in the bulk where $\k$ is the 3D comoving wave number of the perturbations. They diverge at the horizon of the AdS spacetime. The induced density perturbations behave as sound waves with sound velocity $1/\sqrt{3}$ in the low energy universe. At large scales, they are homogeneous perturbations that depend only on time and decay like radiation. They can be identified as the perturbations of the dark radiation. They produce isocurvature perturbations in the matter dominated era. Their effects can be observed as the shifts of the location and the height of the acoustic peak in the CMB spectrum.