Domain Walls with Localised Gravity and Domain-Wall/QFT Correspondence

TL;DR

This paper addresses whether gravity can be localized on dilatonic domain walls generated by a delta-function source and a pure exponential potential, and whether such walls admit a Domain-wall/QFT interpretation. By analyzing explicit BPS domain-wall solutions, their graviton fluctuation spectra, and the resulting corrections to Newtonian gravity, the authors connect these walls to higher-dimensional sphere reductions and the near-horizon geometries of M-branes and Dp-branes with p ≤ 5. A central finding is that gravity localization occurs precisely for walls descending from branes with a natural gravity-decoupling limit, signaling a Domain-wall/QFT correspondence and a UV cutoff interpretation for the dual field theories. The work further links the observed Newtonian corrections to expected one-loop boundary QFT contributions, offering a holographic perspective on how bulk gravity effects emerge from boundary dynamics, and highlighting the special status of p ≤ 5 branes in this framework.

Abstract

We review general domain-wall solutions supported by a delta-function source, together with a single pure exponential scalar potential in supergravity. These scalar potentials arise from a sphere reduction in M-theory or string theory. There are several examples of flat (BPS) domain walls that lead to a localisation of gravity on the brane, and for these we obtain the form of the corrections to Newtonian gravity. These solutions are lifted back on certain internal spheres to D=11 and D=10 as M-branes and D-branes. We find that the domain walls that can trap gravity yield M-branes or Dp-branes that have a natural decoupling limit, i.e. p\le 5, with the delta-function source providing an ultra-violet cut-off in a dual quantum field theory. This suggests that the localisation of gravity can generally be realised within a Domain-wall/QFT correspondence, with the delta-function domain-wall source providing a cut-off from the space-time boundary for these domain-wall solutions. We also discuss the form of the one-loop corrections to the graviton propagator from the boundary QFT that would reproduce the corrections to the Newtonian gravity on the domain wall.