Localised Gravity in the Singular Domain Wall Background?

Abstract

We study singular, supersymmetric domain-wall solutions supported by the massive breathing mode scalars of, for example, sphere reductions in M-theory or string theory. The space-time on one side of such a wall is asymptotic to the Cauchy horizon of the anti-de Sitter (AdS) space-time. However, on the other side there is a naked singularity. The higher-dimensional embedding of these solutions has the novel interpretation of (sphere compactified) brane configurations in the domain ``inside the horizon region,'' with the singularity corresponding to the sphere shrinking to zero volume. The naked singularity is the source of an infinite attractive gravitational potential for the fluctuating modes. Nevertheless, the spectrum is bounded from below, continuous and positive definite, with the wave functions suppressed in the region close to the singularity. The massless bound state is formally excluded due to the boundary condition for the fluctuating mode wave functions at the naked singularity. However, a regularisation of the naked singularity, for example by effects of the order of the inverse string scale, in turn regularises the gravitational potential and allows for precisely one (massless) bound-state spin-2 fluctuating mode. We also contrast spectra in these domain wall backgrounds with those of the domain walls due to the massless modes of sphere reductions.