On electric charge non-conservation in brane world

Abstract

In some models with infinite extra dimensions, gauge fields are localized on a brane by gravity. A generic property of these models is the existence of arbitrarily light bulk modes of charged fields. This property may lead to interesting low-energy effects such as electric charge non-conservation on the brane (decay of electron to nothing). One may worry that light charged Kaluza--Klein modes would lead to unacceptable phenomenology due to their copious production in, e.g., electron-positron annihilation and/or their contribution to QED observables like anomalous magnetic moments. We argue, however, that both loop effects and production of light charged Kaluza--Klein modes are suppressed due to screening effect of gapless spectrum of bulk photons.