Gravitational and cosmological properties of a brane-universe

Abstract

The aim of this contribution is to provide a short introduction to recently investigated models in which our accessible universe is a four-dimensional submanifold, or brane, embedded in a higher dimensional spacetime and ordinary matter is trapped in the brane. I focus here on the gravitational and cosmological aspects of such models with a single extra-dimension.

Comments: Review talk, Journees relativistes, Dublin (2001); 4 pages; Latex (with ws-ijmpa.cls); no figure