What is essential is invisible to the eye. Antoine de Saint-Exupery / Of course, Saint-Exupery didn't have extra dimensions in mind when he wrote this famous line. Nevertheless, the recent realisation that standard model degrees of freedom can naturally be restricted to a submanifold embedded in a higher dimensional Universe means that an ingredient essential to our description of nature might quite literally be "invisible to the eye". / Exploring the consequences of such braneworld scenarios has occupied a large part of the theoretical physics community over the last seven years, and this thesis is a collection of contributions to this endeavour. / After reviewing the motivations for and early successes of braneworld scenarios, we examine rho2 corrections to the Hubble rate in the stabilized Randall-Sundrum I model, where the hierarchy problem is solved in a natural way, in order to ascertain whether such corrections might be of help in addressing some issues with inflation and baryogenesis. The three following chapters are concerned with six-dimensional models that have been advertised as possibly leading to a self-tuning solution to the cosmological constant problem. We examine this claim thoroughly, through the study of thick codimension-two braneworlds. This allows us to provide a generalization of the relationship between the deficit angle and the brane matter content. We also present the first derivation of the Friedmann equations on a codimension-two brane containing matter with an arbitrary equation of state, first in the context of Einstein-Hilbert gravity and then in six dimensional supergravity.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.86059 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Vinet, Jérémie |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Physics.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002271558, proquestno: AAINR21709, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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