The Gospel according to DeWitt revisited: quantum effective action in braneworld models

Abstract

We construct quantum effective action in spacetimes with branes (boundaries) and establish its relation to the "cosmological wave function" of the bulk -- the solution of the corresponding Wheeler-DeWitt equation which can be considered as a means of the holographic description of braneworld models. We show that for a special type of the bulk-brane gauge fixing procedure the one-loop part of the action decouples into the additive sum of brane-to-brane and bulk-to-bulk effective actions, and this decomposition proliferates in a special way in higher orders of the Feynman diagrammatic expansion. This property is based on a special duality relation between the Dirichlet and Neumann boundary value problems when applied to the functional determinants of wave operators and the field-theoretic version of the well-known semiclassical Van Vleck-Morette determinant. It facilitates the gauge-independent way of treating the strong-coupling and VDVZ problems in brane induced gravity models. Importance of this technique in various implications of braneworld theory and infrared modifications of Einstein theory is briefly discussed.