On the existence of crack of doom singularities in some cosmological models with extra dimensions

Abstract

We study the evolution of vacuum multidimensional Friedmann-Robertson-Walker universes. We show that “crack of doom” type singularities, typical of five-dimensional models, can only appear, for more than five dimensions, in some exceptional cases. These singularities are, however, absent when the effective four-dimensional metric is obtained via a Weyl rescaling of the relevant part of the multidimensional metric.