Technical naturalness on a codimension-2 brane

Abstract

We compute how threshold effects obtained by integrating out a heavy particle localized on a codimension-2 brane influence the properties of the brane and the bulk fields it sources in D = d+2 dimensions. We do so using a recently developed formalism for matching the characteristics of higher codimension branes to the properties of the bulk fields they source. We show that although the dominant heavy-mass dependence induced in the low-energy codimension-2 tension has the generic size expected, T 2M d, the very-low-energy effective potential governing the on-brane curvature once bulk KK modes are integrated out can be additionally suppressed, by factors of order κ 2M d, where κ is the bulk gravitational coupling. In the special case of a codimension-2 brane in a 6D supersymmetric bulk we also estimate the size of the contributions of short-wavelength bulk loops near the brane, and find these can be similarly suppressed. © SISSA 2009.