Chern-Simons theory and three-dimensional surfaces

There are two natural Chern-Simons theories associated with the embedding of a three-dimensional surface in Euclidean space; one is constructed using the induced metric connection -- it involves only the intrinsic geometry, the other is extrinsic and uses the connection associated with the gauging of normal rotations. As such, the two theories appear to describe very different aspects of the surface geometry. Remarkably, at a classical level, they are equivalent. In particular, it will be shown that their stress tensors differ only by a null contribution. Their Euler-Lagrange equations provide identical constraints on the normal curvature. A new identity for the Cotton tensor is associated with the triviality of the Chern-Simons theory for embedded hypersurfaces implied by this equivalence. The corresponding null surface stress capturing this information will be constructed explicitly.Comment: 10 pages, unnecessary details removed, typos fixed, references adde

Modified geodetic brane cosmology

We explore the cosmological implications provided by the geodetic brane gravity action corrected by an extrinsic curvature brane term, describing a codimension-1 brane embedded in a 5D fixed Minkowski spacetime. In the geodetic brane gravity action, we accommodate the correction term through a linear term in the extrinsic curvature swept out by the brane. We study the resulting geodetic-type equation of motion. Within a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker metric, we obtain a generalized Friedmann equation describing the associated cosmological evolution. We observe that, when the radiation-like energy contribution from the extra dimension is vanishing, this effective model leads to a self-(non-self)-accelerated expansion of the brane-like universe in dependence on the nature of the concomitant \beta-parameter associated with the correction, which resembles an analogous behaviour in the DGP brane cosmology. Several possibilities in the description for the cosmic evolution of this model are embodied and characterized by the involved density parameters related in turn to the cosmological constant, the geometry characterizing the model, the introduced \beta-parameter as well as the dark like-energy and the matter content on the brane.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures. New version corresponds to the one published in CQ