Covariant approach of perturbations in Lovelock type brane gravity

Abstract: We develop a covariant scheme to describe the dynamics of small perturbations on Lovelock type extended objects propagating in a flat Minkowski spacetime. The higher-dimensional analogue of the Jacobi equation in this theory becomes a wave type equation for a scalar field $\Phi$. Whithin this framework, we analyse the stability of membranes with a de Sitter geometry where we find that the Jacobi equation specializes to a Klein-Gordon (KG) equation for $\Phi$ possessing a tachyonic mass. This shows that, to some extent, these type of extended objects share the symmetries of the Dirac-Nambu-Goto (DNG) action which is by no means coincidental because the DNG model is the simplest included in this type of gravity.