Fermion localization on thick branes

We consider chiral fermion confinement in scalar thick branes, which are known to localize gravity, coupled through a Yukawa term. The conditions for the confinement and their behavior in the thin-wall limit are found for various different BPS branes, including double walls and branes interpolating between different AdS_5 spacetimes. We show that only one massless chiral mode is localized in all these walls, whenever the wall thickness is keep finite. We also show that, independently of wall's thickness, chiral fermionic modes cannot be localized in dS_4 walls embedded in a M_5 spacetime. Finally, massive fermions in double wall spacetimes are also investigated. We find that, besides the massless chiral mode localization, these double walls support quasi-localized massive modes of both chiralities.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure

Close to the edge: hierarchy in a double braneworld

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 sub-walls located at its edges; fermions are coupled to the scalar field through Yukawa interactions, but the the lack of reflection symmetry forces them to be localized in one of the sub-walls. We show that the graviton zero-mode wavefunction is suppressed in the fermion edge by an exponential function of the distance between the sub-walls, and that the massive modes decouple so that Newtonian gravity is recuperated.Comment: Some typos corrected, references adde