Brane Gravity at Low Energy

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that in brane world models with a bulk scalar field, low energy gravity on the brane reduces to Einstein gravity, contrasting with the Brans-Dicke behavior in models without such scalars.

Contribution

The study provides a gauge-invariant analysis of weak brane gravity with a bulk scalar, establishing conditions for radion stabilization and showing Einstein gravity emerges at low energies.

Findings

Low energy gravity is Einstein, not Brans-Dicke, with a bulk scalar.

Radion stabilization condition expressed via scalar potentials.

In models without bulk scalars, gravity remains Brans-Dicke.

Abstract

Four dimensional gravity in the low energy limit of a higher dimensional theory has been expected to be a (generalized) Brans-Dicke theory. A subtle point in brane world scenarios is that the system of four dimensional effective gravitational equations is not closed due to bulk gravitational waves and bulk scalars. Nonetheless, weak gravity on the brane can be analyzed completely. We revisit the theory of weak brane gravity using gauge-invariant gravitational and scalar perturbations around a background warped geometry with a bulk scalar between two flat branes. We obtain a simple condition for the radion stabilization in terms of the scalar field potentials. We show that for general potentials of the scalar field which provides radion stabilization and a general conformal transformation to a frame in which matter on the branes are minimally coupled to the metric, 4-dimensional Einstein gravity, not BD gravity, is restored at low energies on either brane. In contrast, in RS brane world scenario without a bulk scalar, low energy gravity is BD one. We conjecture that in general brane world scenarios with more than one scalar field, one will again encounter the situation that low energy gravity is not described by the Einstein theory. Equipped with the weak gravity results, we discuss the properties of 4d brane gravitational equations, in particular, the value and sign of 4d Newton's gravitational coupling.