Dynamic dilatonic domain walls Original Research Article

Motivated by the “universe as a brane” idea, we investigate the motion of a (D−2)-brane (or domain wall) that couples to bulk matter. Usually one would expect the space-time outside such a wall to be time dependent however we show that in certain cases it can be static, with consistency of the Israel equations yielding relationships between the bulk metric and matter that can be used as ansätze to solve the Einstein equations. As a concrete model we study a domain wall coupled to a bulk dilaton with Liouville potentials for the dilaton both in the bulk and on the wall. The bulk solutions we find are all singular. Some have black hole or cosmological horizons, beyond which our solutions describe domain walls moving in time dependent bulks. A significant period of world-volume inflation occurs if the potential on the wall is not too steep; in some cases the bulk also inflates (with the wall comoving) while in others the wall moves relative to a non-inflating bulk. We apply our method to obtain cosmological solutions of Hořava–Witten theory compactified on a Calabi–Yau space.