Effective action and heat kernel in a toy model of brane-induced gravity

TL;DR

This paper calculates the quantum effective action and heat kernel expansion for a toy model of brane-induced gravity, revealing non-vanishing divergences and unique proper time expansion features related to boundary conditions.

Contribution

It applies a Neumann-Dirichlet reduction technique to derive the effective action and heat kernel expansion in a brane gravity model, including new insights into divergences and boundary effects.

Findings

Effective action includes non-vanishing divergences in all dimensions.

Proper time expansion shows logarithmic and quarter-power terms.

Massless limit yields a Coleman-Weinberg type potential.

Abstract

We apply a recently suggested technique of the Neumann-Dirichlet reduction to a toy model of brane-induced gravity for the calculation of its quantum one-loop effective action. This model is represented by a massive scalar field in the $(d+1)$-dimensional flat bulk supplied with the $d$-dimensional kinetic term localized on a flat brane and mimicking the brane Einstein term of the Dvali-Gabadadze-Porrati (DGP) model. We obtain the inverse mass expansion of the effective action and its ultraviolet divergences which turn out to be non-vanishing for both even and odd spacetime dimensionality $d$. For the massless case, which corresponds to a limit of the toy DGP model, we obtain the Coleman-Weinberg type effective potential of the system. We also obtain the proper time expansion of the heat kernel in this model associated with the generalized Neumann boundary conditions containing second order tangential derivatives. We show that in addition to the usual integer and half-integer powers of the proper time this expansion exhibits, depending on the dimension $d$, either logarithmic terms or powers multiple of one quarter. This property is considered in the context of strong ellipticity of the boundary value problem, which can be violated when the Euclidean action of the theory is not positive definite.