Warped product spaces and geodesic motion in the neighborhood of branes

We study the classical geodesic motions of nonzero rest mass test particles and photons in five-dimensional warped product spaces. We show that it is possible to obtain a general picture of these motions using the natural decoupling that occurs in such spaces between the motions in the fifth dimension and the motion in the hypersurfaces. This splitting allows the use of phase space analysis in order to investigate the possible confinement of particles and photons to hypersurfaces in five-dimensional warped product spaces. Using such an analysis, we find a novel form of quasiconfinement which is oscillatory and neutrally stable. We also find that this class of warped product spaces locally satisfy the Z(2) symmetry by default. The importance of such a confinement is that it is purely due to the classical gravitational effects, without requiring the presence of brane-type confinement mechanisms. (c) 2007 American Institute of Physics.