Is dark matter futile on the brane?

Abstract

We investigate whether dark matter can be replaced by various source terms appearing in the effective Einstein equation, valid on a brane embedded into a higher dimensional space-time (the bulk). Such non-conventional source terms include a quadratic (ordinary) matter source term, a geometric source term originating in the Weyl curvature of the bulk, a source term arising from the possible asymmetric embedding, and finally the pull-back to the brane of possible non-standard model bulk fields.