Bent Domain Walls as Braneworlds

TL;DR

This paper presents new exact solutions for domain walls in curved backgrounds, modeling braneworld scenarios, and explores their implications for cosmology and the effective cosmological constant.

Contribution

It introduces a large class of exact solutions for one and two domain walls with constant curvature, highlighting their potential to cancel the cosmological constant.

Findings

Solutions where each wall has positive tension

Curvature of walls can be much smaller than tension

Potential for significant cancellation of the cosmological constant

Abstract

We consider domain walls embedded in curved backgrounds as an approximation for braneworld scenarios. We give a large class of new exact solutions, exhausting the possibilities for describing one and two walls for the cases where the curvature of both the bulk and the wall is locally constant. In the case of two walls, we find solutions where each wall has positive tension. An interesting property of these solutions is that the curvature of the walls can be much smaller than the tension, leading to a significant cancellation of the effective cosmological constant, which however is still much larger than the observational limits. We further discuss some aspects of inflation in models based on wall solutions.