Coulomb's law corrections and fermion field localization in a tachyonic de Sitter thick braneworld

Abstract: In this work, following recent studies which show that it is possible to localize gravity as well as scalar and gauge vector fields in a tachyonic de Sitter thick braneworld, we investigate the localization of fermion fields in this model. In order to achieve this aim we consider the Yukawa interaction term between the fermions and the tachyonic condensate scalar field MF(T)barPsiPsi in the action and analyze four different cases corresponding to distinct tachyonic functions F(T(w)). The only condition that this function must satisfy in order to yield 4D chiral fermions upon dimensional reduction is to be odd in the extra dimension w. These functions lead to a different structure of the respective fermionic mass spectrum. In particular, localization of the massless left-chiral fermion zero mode is possible for three of these cases. We further analyze the phenomenology of the Yukawa interaction among fermion fields and gauge bosons localized on the brane and obtain the crucial and necessary information to compute the corrections to Coulomb's law coming from massive KK vector modes in the non-relativistic limit. These corrections are exponentially suppressed due to the presence of the mass gap in the mass spectrum of the bulk gauge vector field. From our results we conclude that corrections to Coulomb's law in the thin brane limit have the same form (up to a numerical factor) as far as the left-chiral massless fermion field is localized on the brane. Finally we compute the corrections to the Coulomb's law for a more general case, on a thick brane scenario, for which we can do estimates consistent with brane phenomenology, i.e. we found that the predicted corrections to the Coulomb law in our model, which are well bounded by the observed experimental photon mass, is far beyond its upper bound, positively testing the viability of our tachyonic braneworld.