Geodesics and Newton's Law in Brane Backgrounds

Abstract

In brane world models our universe is considered as a brane imbedded into a higher dimensional space. We discuss the behaviour of geodesics in the Randall-Sundrum background and point out that free massive particles cannot move along the brane only. The brane is repulsive, and matter will be expelled from the brane into the extra dimension. This is rather undesirable, and hence we study an alternative model with a non-compact extra dimension, but with an attractive brane embedded into the higher dimensional space. We study the linearized gravity equations and show that Newton's gravitational law is valid on the brane also in the alternative background.