Eur. Phys. J. C (2015) 75: 569
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-015-3803-0

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Thick brane in f(R) gravity with Palatini dynamics

¹ Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal da Paraíba, João Pessoa, PB, 58051-900, Brazil
² Departamento de Ciências Exatas, Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Rio Tinto, PB, 58297-000, Brazil
³ Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal de Campina Grande, Campina Grande, PB, 58109-970, Brazil
⁴ Departamento de Física Teórica, IFIC, Centro Mixto Universidad de Valencia-CSIC, Universidad de Valencia, 46100, Burjassot, Valencia, Spain
⁵ Faculdade de Ciências, Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, Universidade de Lisboa, Campo Grande, 1749-016, Lisbon, Portugal
⁶ Department of Physics, Center for Field Theory and Particle Physics, Fudan University, 220 Handan Road, Shanghai, 200433, China

^* e-mail: drgarcia@fc.ul.pt

Received: 4 February 2015
Accepted: 20 November 2015
Published online: 30 November 2015

Abstract

This work deals with modified gravity in five-dimensional space-time. We study a thick Palatini f(R) brane, that is, a braneworld scenario described by an anti-de Sitter warped geometry with a single extra dimension of infinite extent, sourced by a real scalar field under the Palatini approach, where the metric and the connection are regarded as independent degrees of freedom. We consider a first-order framework which we use to provide exact solutions for the scalar field and warp factor. We also investigate a perturbative scenario such that the Palatini approach is implemented through a Lagrangian , where the small parameter controls the deviation from the standard thick brane case. In both cases it is found that the warp factor tends to localize the extra dimension due to the nonlinear corrections.