A criterion for admissible singularities in brane world

Abstract

When gravity couples to scalar fields in Anti-de Sitter space, the geometry becomes non-AdS and develops singularities generally. We propose a criterion that the singularity is physically admissible if the integral of the on-shell Lagrangian density over the finite range is finite everywhere. For all classes of the singularities studied here, the criterion suggested in this paper coincides with an independent proposal made by Gubser that the potential should be bounded from above in the solution. This gives a reason why Gubser's conjecture works.