Cosmic strings in a brane world theory with metastable gravitons
Nov, 200114 pages
Published in:
- Phys.Rev.D 66 (2002) 043509
e-Print:
- hep-th/0111168 [hep-th]
Report number:
- NYU-TH-01-11-01
View in:
Citations per year
Abstract:
If the graviton possesses an arbitrarily small (but nonvanishing) mass, perturbation theory implies that cosmic strings have a nonzero Newtonian potential. Nevertheless in Einstein gravity, where the graviton is strictly massless, the Newtonian potential of a cosmic string vanishes. This discrepancy is an example of the van Dam--Veltman--Zakharov (VDVZ) discontinuity. We present a solution for the metric around a cosmic string in a braneworld theory with a graviton metastable on the brane. This theory possesses those features that yield a VDVZ discontinuity in massive gravity, but nevertheless is generally covariant and classically self-consistent. Although the cosmic string in this theory supports a nontrivial Newtonian potential far from the source, one can recover the Einstein solution in a region near the cosmic string. That latter region grows as the graviton's effective linewidth vanishes (analogous to a vanishing graviton mass), suggesting the lack of a VDVZ discontinuity in this theory. Moreover, the presence of scale dependent structure in the metric may have consequences for the search for cosmic strings through gravitational lensing techniques.- 98.80.Cq
- astrophysics: string
- membrane model
- graviton
- space-time
- dimension: 5
- Einstein equation
- weak field
References(22)
Figures(0)