Dimensional reduction via a novel Higgs mechanism

Abstract

Many theories of quantum gravity live in higher dimensions, and their reduction to four dimensions via mechanisms such as Kaluza-Klein compactification or brane world models have associated problems. We propose a novel mechanism of dimensional reduction via spontaneous symmetry breaking of a higher dimensional local Lorentz group to one in lower dimensions. Working in the gauge theory formulation of gravity, we couple a scalar field to spin connections, include a potential for the field, and show that for a suitable choice of scalar vacuum, the local Lorentz symmetry of the action gets spontaneously reduced to one in a lower dimension. Thus effectively the dimension of spacetime gets reduced by one. This provides a viable mechanism for the dimensional reduction, and may have applications in theories of quantum gravity.

3 pages. Typos corrected, minor revisions. Matches published version in Gen. Rel. Grav

References in corpus (4)

• The Higgs Phenomenon in Quantum Gravity
• Natural Braneworld Inflation in Light of Recent Results from Planck and BICEP2
• Massive Hermitian Gravity
• The graviton Higgs mechanism

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