Braneworld localisation in hyperbolic spacetime

Abstract

We present a construction employing a type IIA supergravity and 3-form flux background together with an NS5-brane that localises massless gravity near the 5-brane worldvolume. The nonsingular underlying type IIA solution is a lift to 10D of the vacuum solution of the 6D Salam-Sezgin model and has a hyperbolic ${\cal H}^{(2,2)}\times S^1$ structure in the lifting dimensions. A fully back-reacted solution including the NS5-brane is constructed by recognising the 10D Salam-Sezgin vacuum solution as a "brane resolved through transgression." The background hyperbolic structure plays a key rôle in generating a mass gap in the spectrum of the transverse-space wave operator, which gives rise to the localisation of gravity on the 6D NS5-brane worldvolume, or, equally, in a further compactification to 4D. Also key to the successful localisation of gravity is the specific form of the corresponding transverse wavefunction Schrödinger problem, which asymptotically involves a $V=-1/(4ρ^2)$ potential, where $ρ$ is the transverse-space radius, and for which the NS5-brane source gives rise to a specific choice of self-adjoint extension for the transverse wave operator. The corresponding boundary condition as $ρ\to0$ ensures the masslessness of gravity in the effective braneworld theory. Above the mass gap, there is a continuum of massive states which give rise to small corrections to Newton's law.