We analyse the distributional thin wall limit of self gravitating scalar field configurations representing thick domain wall geometries. We show that thick wall solutions can be generated by appropiate scaling of the thin wall ones, and obtain an exact solution for a domain wall that interpolates between AdS_4 asymptotic vacua and has a well-defined thin wall limit.Solutions representing scalar field configurations obtained via the same scaling but that do not have a thin wall limit are also presented.Comment: 10 pages, revte

Asymmetric brane worlds with dS expansion and static double kink topology are obtained from a recently proposed method and their properties are analyzed. These domain walls interpolate between two spacetimes with different cosmological constants. In the dynamic case, the vacua correspond to dS and AdS geometry, unlike the static case where they correspond to AdS background. We show that is possible to confine gravity on such branes. In particular, the double brane world host two different walls, so that the gravity is localized on one of them.

We consider the effects of spacetime curvature and brane thickness on the localization of gauge fields on a brane via kinetic terms induced by localized fermions. We find that in a warped geometry with and infinitely thin brane, both the infrared and the ultraviolet behavior of the electromagnetic propagator are affected, providing a more stringent bound on the brane's tension than that coming from the requirement of four-dimensional gravity on the brane. On the other hand, for a thick wall in a flat spacetime, where the fermions are localized by means of a Yukawa coupling, we find that 4-dimensional electromagnetism is recovered in a region bounded from above by the same critical distance appearing in the thin case, but also from below by a new scale related to the brane's thickness and the electromagnetic couplings.

A new method to obtain thick domain wall solutions to the coupled Einstein scalar field system is presented. The procedure allows the construction of irregular walls from well known ones, such that the spacetime associated to them are physically different. As consequence of the approach, we obtain two irregular geometries corresponding to thick domain walls with $dS$ expansion and topological double kink embedded in $AdS$ spacetime. In particular, the double brane can be derived from a fake superpotential.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, added references, some equations correcte

We show that the hierarchy between the Planck and the weak scales can follow from the tendency of gravitons and fermions to localize at different edges of a thick double wall embedded in an AdS 5 spacetime without reflection symmetry. This double wall is a stable BPS thick-wall solution with two subwalls located at its edges; fermions are coupled to the scalar field through Yukawa interactions, but the lack of reflection symmetry forces them to be localized in one of the subwalls. We show that the graviton zero-mode wave function is suppressed in the fermion edge by an exponential function of the distance between the subwalls, and that the massive modes decouple so that Newtonian gravity is recuperated.