Casimir energy for de Sitter branes in bulk AdS5

The vacuum energy for a massless conformally coupled scalar field in a brane world set up, corresponding to de Sitter branes in a bulk anti-de Sitter spacetime, is calculated. We use the Euclidean version of the metric which can be conformally related to a metric similar in form to the Einstein universe (S4×R). Employing ζ-function regularisation we evaluate the one-loop effective potential and show that the vacuum energy is zero for the one brane and non-zero for the two brane configuration. We comment on the back-reaction of this Casimir energy and on the inclusion of a mass term or non-conformal coupling.