General relativity with small cosmological constant from spontaneous compactification of Lovelock theory in vacuum
- Centro de Estudios Cientificos, Casilla 1469, Valdivia (Chile)
- Instituto de Fisica, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Austral de Chile, Valdivia (Chile)
It is shown that Einstein gravity in four dimensions with small cosmological constant and small extra dimensions can be obtained by spontaneous compactification of Lovelock gravity in vacuum. Assuming that the extra dimensions are compact spaces of constant curvature, general relativity is recovered within a certain class of Lovelock theories possessing necessarily cubic or higher order terms in curvature. This bounds the higher dimension to at least 7. Remarkably, the effective gauge coupling and Newton constant in four dimensions are not proportional to the gravitational constant in higher dimensions, but are shifted with respect to their standard values. This effect opens up new scenarios where a maximally symmetric solution in higher dimensions could decay into the compactified spacetime either by tunneling or through a gravitational analog of ghost condensation. Indeed, this is what occurs requiring both the extra dimensions and the four-dimensional cosmological constant to be small.
- OSTI ID:
- 21322488
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Vol. 80, Issue 4; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.80.044029; (c) 2009 The American Physical Society; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0556-2821
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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