Cosmological evolution of a purely conical codimension-2 brane world

Abstract

We study the cosmological evolution of isotropic matter on an infinitely thin conical codimension-two brane-world. Our analysis is based on the boundary dynamics of a six-dimensional model in the presence of an induced gravity term on the brane and a Gauss-Bonnet term in the bulk. With the assumption that the bulk contains only a cosmological constant Lambda_B, we find that the isotropic evolution of the brane-universe imposes a tuned relation between the energy density and the brane equation of state. The evolution of the system has fixed points (attractors), which correspond to a final state of radiation for Lambda_B=0 and to de Sitter state for Lambda_B>0. Furthermore, considering anisotropic matter on the brane, the tuning of the parameters is lifted, and new regions of the parametric space are available for the cosmological evolution of the brane-universe. The analysis of the dynamics of the system shows that, the isotropic fixed points remain attractors of the system, and for values of Lambda_B which give acceptable cosmological evolution of the equation of state, the line of isotropic tuning is a very weak attractor. The initial conditions, in this case, need to be fine tuned to have an evolution with acceptably small anisotropy.