Warped brane worlds in critical gravity

Abstract

We investigate the brane models in arbitrary dimensional critical gravity presented in Lu and Pope (Phys Rev Lett 106:181302, 2011). For the models of the thin branes with codimension one, the Gibbons–Hawking surface term and the junction conditions are derived, with which the analytical solutions for the flat, AdS, and dS branes are obtained at the critical point of the critical gravity. It is found that all these branes are embedded in an AdS $$_{n}$$ spacetime, but, in general, the effective cosmological constant $$\varLambda $$ of the AdS $$_{n}$$ spacetime is not equal to the naked one $$\varLambda _0$$ in the critical gravity, which can be positive, zero, and negative. Another interesting result is that the brane tension can also be positive, zero, or negative, depending on the symmetry of the thin brane and the values of the parameters of the theory, which is very different from the case in general relativity. It is shown that the mass hierarchy problem can be solved in the braneworld model in the higher-derivative critical gravity. We also study the thick brane model and find analytical and numerical solutions of the flat, AdS, and dS branes. It is found that some branes will have inner structure when some parameters of the theory are larger than their critical values, which may result in resonant KK modes for some bulk matter fields. The flat branes with positive energy density and AdS branes with negative energy density are embedded in an $$n$$ -dimensional AdS spacetime, while the dS branes with positive energy density are embedded in an $$n$$ -dimensional Minkowski one.