Electric charge non-conservation in brane world

by Sergei DUBOVSKY (INR Moscow)

Thursday 22 Aug 2002, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

TH Auditorium (CERN)

A generic property of models with infinite extra dimensions is a presence of quasilocalized states, i.e., particles may be not trapped on the brane forever but have a finite probability to escape into the bulk. This property may lead to interesting low-energy effects such as electric charge non-conservation on the brane (decay of electron to nothing). This effect is closely related to the presence of arbitrarily light charged Kaluza-Klein modes in such models. One may worry that these 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 the screening effect of the gapless spectrum of bulk photons. We also briefly discuss the effect of quasilocalization on the non-commutative solitons describing D-branes in string theory.