Two-scalar-field $f(R)$ Thick Branes, Gravitational Resonances and Quasinormal Modes

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate thick brane worlds in $f(R)$ gravity supported by two-scalar-field. The two-scalar sector provides an analytical warped background with tunable energy-density splitting, allowing us to test whether a Bloch-type internal structure can generate long-lived tensor perturbations resonances in the physically admissible region. We impose the positivity of \(f_R\equiv df/dR\), the derivative of the gravitational Lagrangian with respect to the Ricci scalar, which plays the role of an effective gravitational coupling in \(f(R)\) gravity. This separates the smooth ghost-free branch from a singular branch where this effective coupling vanishes. In the ghost-free branch, neither the relative-probability spectrum nor the phase-shift transmission spectrum shows narrow real-axis resonant peaks. These real-axis diagnostics indicate that the internal brane structure alone does not produce long-lived tensor resonances in the ghost-free region. Sharp quasi-localization peaks appear only in the singular branch, where the vanishing effective coupling induces divergent structures in the tensor potential; these peaks should therefore be interpreted as singular-boundary signals rather than ghost-free resonances of the smooth brane background. We then characterize the ghost-free massive Kaluza-Klein modes in the complex-frequency plane. Using the Asymptotic Iteration Method where applicable and time-domain evolutions with a supersymmetric partner potential as a zero-mode filtering tool, we extract the fundamental quasinormal frequencies. The modes have negative imaginary parts and quality factors \(Q\simeq0.9-1.9\), showing that the ghost-free massive tensor excitations are broad, short-lived dissipative modes. Thus the QNM spectrum provides the appropriate complex-frequency description of the Kaluza-Klein dynamics when no narrow real-axis resonances are resolved.