The effective field theory of codimension-two branes

Abstract

Distributional sources of matter on codimension-two and higher branes are only well-defined as regularized objects. Nevertheless, intuition from effective field theory suggests that the low-energy physics on such branes should be independent of any high-energy regularization scheme. In this paper, we address this issue in the context of a scalar field model where matter fields (the standard model) living on such a brane interact with bulk fields (gravity). The low-energy effective theory is shown to be consistent and independent of the regularization scheme, provided the brane couplings are renormalized appropriately at the classical level. We perform explicit computations of the classical renormalization group flows at tree and one-loop level, demonstrate that the theory is renormalizable against codimension-two divergences, and extend the analysis to several physical applications such as electrodynamics and brane localized kinetic terms.