Supernova limits on brane world cosmology

Abstract

By combining the first year data from the Supernova Legacy Survey (SN LS) and the recent detection of the baryon acoustic peak in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data, we are able to place strong constraints on models where the cosmic acceleration is due to the leakage of gravity from the brane into the bulk on large scales. In particular, we are able to show that the DGP model is not compatible with a spatially flat universe. We generalize our analysis to phenomenological toy models where the curvature of the brane enters into the Friedmann equations in different ways.