Localized (Super)Gravity and Cosmological Constant

We consider localization of gravity in domain wall solutions of Einstein’s gravity coupled to a scalar field with a generic potential. We discuss conditions on the scalar potential such that domain wall solutions are non-singular. Such solutions even exist for appropriate potentials which have no minima at all and are unbounded below. Domain walls of this type have infinite tension, while usual kink type of solutions interpolating between two AdS minima have finite tension. In the latter case the cosmological constant on the domain wall is necessarily vanishing, while in the former case it can be zero or negative. Positive cosmological constant is allowed for singular domain walls. We discuss non-trivial conditions for physically allowed singularities arising from the requirement that truncating the space at the singularities be consistent. Nonsingular domain walls with infinite tension might a priori avoid recent “no-go” theorems indicating impossibility of supersymmetric embedding of kink type of domain walls in gauged supergravity. We argue that (non-singular) domain walls are stable even if they have infinite tension. This is essentially due to the fact that localization of gravity in smooth domain walls is a Higgs mechanism corresponding to a spontaneous breakdown of translational invariance. As to discontinuous domain walls arising in the presence of δ-function “brane” sources, they explicitly break translational invariance. Such solutions cannot therefore be thought of as limits of smooth domain walls. We point out that if the scalar potential has no minima and approaches finite negative values at infinity, then higher derivative terms are under control, and do not affect the cosmological constant which is vanishing for such backgrounds. Nonetheless, we also point out that higher curvature terms generically delocalize gravity, so that the desired lower dimensional Newton’s law is no longer reproduced. Typeset using REVTEX E-mail: [email protected]