Cosmology and gravity in the brane world

The cosmology in the Hubble expansion era of the Horava-Witten M-theory compactified on a Calabi-Yau threefold is studied in the reduction to five-dimensions where the effects of the Calabi-Yau manifold are summarized by the volume modulus, and all perturbative potentials are included. Matter on the branes are treated as first order perturbations of the static vacuum solution, and all equations in the bulk and all boundary conditions on both end branes are imposed. It is found that for a static volume modulus and a static fifth dimension, y, one can recover the four dimensional Robertson-Friedmann-Walker cosmology for relativistic matter on the branes, but not for non-relativistic matter. For relativistic matter, the Hubble parameter H becomes independent of y to first order in matter density, and if a consistent solution for nonrelativistic matter exists it would require H to be y dependent. These results hold also when an arbitrary number of 5-branes are included in the bulk. The five dimensional Horava-Witten model is compared with the Randall Sundrum phenomenology with a scalar field in the bulk where a bulk and brane potential are used so that the vacuum solutions can be rigorously obtained.(In the Appendix, the difficulty of obtaining approximate vacuum solutions for other potentials is discussed.) In this case nonrelativistic matter is accommodated by allowing the distance between the branes to vary. It is suggested that non-perturbative potentials for the vacuum solution of Horava-Witten theory are needed to remove the inconsistency that non-relativistic matter creates. Also considered is the problem of gravitational forces between point particles on the branes in a Randall-Sundrum (R-S) two brane model with S1/Z2 symmetry. Matter is assumed to produce a perturbation to the R-S vacuum metric and all the 5D Einstein equations are solved to linearized order (for arbitrary matter on both branes). We show that while the gauge condition hi5 = 0, i = 0, 1, 2, 3 can always be achieved without brane bending, the condition h55 = 0 leads to large brane bending. The static potential arising from the zero modes and the corrections due to the Kaluza-Klein (KK) modes are calculated. Gravitational forces on the Planck (y1 = 0) brane recover Newtonian physics with small KK corrections (in accord with other work). However, forces on the TeV (y2) brane due to particles on that brane are strongly distorted by large R-S exponentials, making the model in disagreement with experiment if the TeV brane is the physical brane.