On Brane-World Cosmology

In the study of three-brane cosmological models, an unusual law of cosmological expansion on the brane has been reported. According to this law, the energy density of matter on the brane quadratically enters the right-hand side of the new equations for the brane world, in contrast with the standard cosmology, where it enters the similar equations linearly. However, this result is obtained in the absence of curvature-dependent terms in the action for the brane. In this paper, we derive the field equations for a brane world embedded into a five-dimensional spacetime in the case where such terms are present. We also discuss some cosmological solutions of the resulting equations.