A formalism to analyze the spectrum of brane world scenarios

In this paper we develop a formalism to analyze the spectrum of small perturbations about arbitrary solutions of Einstein, Yang-Mills and scalar systems. We consider a general system of gravitational, gauge and scalar fields in a D-dimensional space-time and give the bilinear action for the fluctuations of the fields in the system around an arbitrary solution of the classical field equations. We then consider warped geometries, popular in brane world scenarios, and use the light cone gauge to separate the bilinear action into a totally decoupled spin-two, -one and -zero fluctuations. We apply our general scheme to several examples and discuss in particular localization of Abelian and non-Abelian gauge fields of the standard model to branes generated by scalar fields. We show, in particular, that the Nielsen-Olesen string solution gives rise to a normalizable localized spin-1 field in any number of dimensions. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.