(De)stabilization of an extra dimension due to a Casimir force

Ralf Hofmann, Panagiota Kanti, Maxim Pospelov

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72 Scopus citations

Abstract

We study the stabilization of one spatial dimension in (p+ 1 + l)-dimensional spacetime in the presence of p-dimensional brane(s), a bulk cosmological constant and the Casimir force generated by a conformally coupled scalar field. We find general static solutions to the metric which require the fine-tuning of the interbrane distance and the bulk cosmological constant (leaving the two brane tensions as free parameters) corresponding to a vanishing effective cosmological constant and a constant radion field. Taking these solutions as a background configuration, we perform a dimensional reduction and study the effective theory in the case of one- and two-brane configurations. We show that the radion field can have a positive mass squared, which corresponds to a stabilization of the extra dimension, only for a repulsive nature of the Casimir force. This type of solution requires the presence of a negative tension brane. The solutions with one or two positive tension branes arising in this theory turn out to have negative radion mass squared, and therefore are not stable.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number124020
JournalPhysical Review D
Volume63
Issue number12
DOIs
StatePublished - 2001

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