GRAVITATIONAL HIGGS MECHANISM

Abstract

We discuss the gravitational Higgs mechanism in domain wall background solutions that arise in the theory of five-dimensional Einstein–Hilbert gravity coupled to a scalar field with a nontrivial potential. The scalar fluctuations in such backgrounds can be completely gauged away, and so can be the graviphoton fluctuations. On the other hand, we show that the graviscalar fluctuations do not have normalizable modes. As to the four-dimensional graviton fluctuations, in the case where the volume of the transverse dimension is finite the massive modes are plane-wave normalizable, while the zero mode is quadratically normalizable. We then discuss the coupling of domain wall gravity to localized four-dimensional matter. In particular, we point out that this coupling is consistent only if the matter is conformal. This is different from the Randall–Sundrum case as there is a discontinuity in the δ-function-like limit of such a smooth domain wall — the latter breaks diffeomorphisms only spontaneously, while the Randall–Sundrum brane breaks diffeomorphisms explicitly. Finally, at the quantum level both the domain wall as well as the Randall–Sundrum setups suffer from inconsistencies in the coupling between gravity and localized matter, as well as the fact that gravity is generically expected to be delocalized in such backgrounds due to higher curvature terms.