Experimentally Probing the Shape of Extra Dimensions

Abstract

In brane world scenarios in which only gravity can propagate in the extra dimensions, effects on the gravitational force may be experimentally testable if there are two or three large extra dimensions. The strength of the force at distances smaller than the compactification radius will be sensitive to the volume of the extra dimensions, but the determination of the shape requires knowing the gravitational potential at intermediate scales. We determine the dependence of the potential vs. distance as a function of both the relative size of the extra dimensions and the possible angle between the extra dimensional unit vectors, and show that high precision measurements of the gravitational force will allow the determination of the shape of the extra dimensions.