Note on the Radion Effective Potential in the Presence of Branes

Abstract

In String Theory compactification, branes are often invoked to get the desired form of the radion effective potential. Current popular way of doing this assumes that the introduction of branes will not modify the background geometry in an important way. In this paper, we show by an explicit example that at least in the codimension 2 case, the gravitational backreaction of the brane cannot be neglected in deriving the radion effective potential. Actually, in this case, the presence of branes will have no effect on the dynamics of radion.