Higher-dimensional perturbations of the vacuum energy density

Abstract

The vacuum energy density arising from the broken supersymmetry of the (standard-model) fields living on a brane cannot be fully "off-loaded" to the bulk: even assuming the existence of an effective "self-tuning" mechanism, a small fraction of the transferred energy "bunces back" to the brane, as a backreaction of the supersymmetry breaking gravitationally transmitted to the bulk. In that case the SUSY scale of the brane has to be bounded, to guarantee the consistency of such a residual energy density with current large-scale phenomonological constraints. This effect is illustrated by computing the zero-point energies of the tower of (higher-dimensional) massive states associated to tensor metric fluctuations on a brane embedded in a warped bulk geometry, and it is shown to be independent of the number of compact or non-compact extra dimensions.

10 pages, no figures, to appear in JHEP