Bounds on curved domain walls in 5D gravity

Abstract

We discuss maximally symmetric curved deformations of the flat domain wall solutions of five-dimensional dilaton gravity that appeared in a recent approach to the cosmological constant problem. By analyzing the bulk field configurations and the boundary conditions at a four-dimensional maximally symmetric curved domain wall, we obtain constraints on such solutions. For a special dilaton coupling to the brane tension that appeared in recent works, we find no curved deformations, confirming and extending slightly a result of Arkani-Hamed et al. which was argued using a ${Z}_{2}$ symmetry of the solution. For more general dilaton-dependent brane tension, we find that the curvature is bounded by the Kaluza-Klein scale in the fifth dimension.