2018/06/25 by Saurya Das, Mir Faizal
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Brane #Compactification (mathematics) #Dimensional reduction #Extra dimensions #Higgs boson #Higgs field #Higgs mechanism #Large extra dimension #Noncommutative and Quantum Gravity Theories #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Quantum #Quantum gravity #Quantum mechanics #Spacetime #Theoretical physics #gr-qc #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/s10714-018-2409-x
published as Gen. Rel. Grav. 50, 87 (2018) · 3 pages. Typos corrected, minor revisions. Matches published version in Gen. Rel. Grav
arxiv created 2018/06/25 · openalex publication_date 2018/06/25 · arxiv updated 2018/07/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
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.