Discrete Gravitational Dimensions

Abstract

We study the physics of a single discrete gravitational extra dimension using the effective field theory for massive gravitons. We first consider a minimal discretization with 4D gravitons on the sites and nearest neighbor hopping terms. At the linear level, 5D continuum physics is recovered correctly, but at the non-linear level the theory becomes highly non-local in the discrete dimension. There is a peculiar UV/IR connection, where the scale of strong interactions at high energies is related to the radius of the dimension. These new effects formally vanish in the limit of zero lattice spacing, but do not do so quickly enough to reproduce the continuum physics consistently in an effective field theory up to the 5D Planck scale. Nevertheless, this model does make sense as an effective theory up to energies parametrically higher than the compactification scale. In order to have a discrete theory that appears local in the continuum limit, the lattice action must have interactions between distant sites. We speculate on the relevance of these observations to the construction of finite discrete theories of gravity in four dimensions.