Brane Localization and Stabilization via Regional Physics
  Extra-dimensional scenarios have become widespread among particle and
gravitational theories of physics to address several outstanding problems,
including cosmic acceleration, the weak hierarchy problem, and the quantization
of gravity. In general, the topology and geometry of the full spacetime
manifold will be non-trivial, even if our ordinary dimensions have the topology
of their covering space. Most compact manifolds are inhomogeneous, even if they
admit a homogeneous geometry, and it will be physically relevant where in the
extra-dimensions one is located. In this letter, we explore the use of both
local and global effects in a braneworld scenario to naturally provide
position-dependent forces that determine and stabilize the location of a single
brane. For illustrative purposes, we consider the 2-dimensional hyperbolic horn
and the Euclidean cone as toy models of the extra-dimensional manifold, and add
a brane wrapped around one of the two spatial dimensions. We calculate the
total energy due to brane tension and bending (extrinsic curvature) as well as
that due to the Casimir energy of a bulk scalar satisfying a Dirchlet boundary
condition on the brane. From the competition of at least two of these effects
there can exist a stable minimum of the effective potential for the brane
location. However, on more generic spaces (on which more symmetries are broken)
any one of these effects may be sufficient to stabilize the brane. We discuss
this as an example of physics that is neither local nor global, but regional.
