Probing extra dimensions using Nambu-Goldstone bosons

We investigate a possibility that our four-dimensional world is a brane-like object embedded in a higher dimensional spacetime. In such a situation, the transverse coordinates of the brane become the Nambu-Goldstone bosons which appear as a result of spontaneous breaking of the translation symmetry. We determine the form of the effective action of the system, finding the explicit form of the vierbein induced on the brane in terms of the Nambu-Goldstone boson variables and the bulk vielbein. As was pointed out in the previous paper, the Kaluza-Klein mode couplings are suppressed by the effect of the brane fluctuation and the suppression is stronger if the brane tension is smaller. However, we here show that the brane tension cannot be arbitrarily small since the inverse of the brane tension gives the coupling constant of the Nambu-Goldstone bosons. A rather stringent bound is obtained for the brane tension and the fundamental (`string') scale from the consideration of the cooling process of the supernova.