Shadow cast by rotating braneworld black holes with a cosmological constant

We propose a new higher-dimensional mechanism for solving the Hierarchy Problem. The Weak scale is generated from a large scale of order the Planck scale through an exponential hierarchy. However, this exponential arises not from gauge interactions but from the background metric (which is a slice of AdS_5 spacetime). This mechanism relies on the existence of only a single additional dimension. We demonstrate a simple explicit example of this mechanism with two three-branes, one of which contains the Standard Model fields. The experimental consequences of this scenario are new and dramatic. There are fundamental spin-2 excitations with mass of weak scale order, which are coupled with weak scale as opposed to gravitational strength to the standard model particles. The phenomenology of these models is quite distinct from that of large extra dimension scenarios; none of the current constraints on theories with very large extra dimensions apply.

Conventional wisdom states that Newton's force law implies only four non-compact dimensions. We demonstrate that this is not necessarily true in the presence of a non-factorizable background geometry. The specific example we study is a single 3-brane embedded in five dimensions. We show that even without a gap in the Kaluza-Klein spectrum, four-dimensional Newtonian and general relativistic gravity is reproduced to more than adequate precision.

We carefully investigate the gravitational equations of the brane world, in which all the matter forces except gravity are confined on the 3-brane in a 5-dimensional spacetime with \(Z_2\) symmetry. We derive the effective gravitational equations on the brane, which reduce to the conventional Einstein equations in the low energy limit. {}From our general argument we conclude that the first Randall & Sundrum-type theory (RS1) [hep-ph/9905221] predicts that the brane with the negative tension is an anti-gravity world and hence should be excluded from the physical point of view. Their second-type theory (RS2) [hep-th/9906064] where the brane has the positive tension provides the correct signature of gravity. In this latter case, if the bulk spacetime is exactly anti-de Sitter, generically the matter on the brane is required to be spatially homogeneous because of the Bianchi identities. By allowing deviations from anti-de Sitter in the bulk, the situation will be relaxed and the Bianchi identities give just the relation between the Weyl tensor and the energy momentum tensor. In the present brane world scenario, the effective Einstein equations cease to be valid during an era when the cosmological constant on the brane is not well-defined, such as in the case of the matter dominated by the potential energy of the scalar field.