Extra dimensions, orthopositronium decay, and stellar cooling.pdfVIP

a r X i v : 0 7 0 9 .2 1 6 4 v 1 [ h e p - p h ] 1 4 S e p 2 0 0 7 LA-UR-07-5609 Extra dimensions, orthopositronium decay, and stellar cooling A. Friedland? and M. Giannotti? Elementary Particles and Field Theory Group, MS B285, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545 (Dated: September 13, 2007) Abstract In a class of extra dimensional models with a warped metric and a single brane the photon can be localized on the brane by gravity only. An intriguing feature of these models is the possibility of the photon escaping into the extra dimensions. The search for this effect has motivated the present round of precision orthopositronium decay experiments. We point out that in this framework a photon in plasma should be metastable. We consider the astrophysical consequences of this observation, in particular, what it implies for the plasmon decay rate in globular cluster stars and for the core-collapse supernova cooling rate. The resulting bounds on the model parameter exceed the possible reach of orthopositronium experiments by many orders of magnitude. PACS numbers: 11.10.Kk, 14.70.Bh, 13.40.Hq, 97.10.Cv ?Electronic address: friedland@lanl.gov ?Electronic address: maurizio@lanl.gov 1 I. INTRODUCTION Theories with extra dimensions [1, 2, 3, 4]1 have been very popular in the last decade [6, 7, 8, 9]. In a large class of such theories the extra-dimensional space is “warped”, i.e. the metric scales exponentially along one of the additional dimensions (see Eq. (1) later). The scaling arises naturally as a solution of Einstein’s equations in the extra-dimensional “bulk” filled with a negative cosmological constant. This solution has the same origin as the inflationary solution, a(t) ～ exp(√Λt/Mpl), but is “aligned” to scale along one of the spatial directions, rather than the time direction. This “inflation along a spatial direction” can be arranged by introducing one or more domain walls (branes), tuning their tension(s), and replacing the positive cosmol