Gravitation and cosmology in a brane-universe

Abstract

Recent theoretical developments have generated a strong interest in the ``brane-world'' picture, which assumes that ordinary matter is trapped in a three-dimensional submanifold, usually called brane, embedded in a higher dimensional space. The purpose of this review is to introduce some basic results concerning gravity in these models and then to present various aspects of the cosmology in a brane-universe.

Comments: Invited review talk given at the 11th Workshop on General Relativity and Gravitation, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan (Jan 2002); 14 pages; Latex; one figure