Spontaneous symmetry breaking in the bulk and the localization of fields on the brane

We consider real and complex scalar fields nonminimally coupled to gravity in the bulk spacetime and study their impact on the brane upon acquiring a nonvanishing vacuum expectation value. When examining the case of the complex scalar field, a minimally coupled U(1) gauge field is also considered so that spontaneous symmetry breaking can take place. Particular attention is paid to the terms arising from the junction conditions, which act towards reinforcing the mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking. We find that the embedding of a braneworld universe in a bulk spacetime endowed with matter fields can induce this mechanism at very high energies and that matter localized on the brane will only interact with bulk matter fields through gravity when a nonminimal coupling exists.