Cosmological evolution with brane-bulk energy exchange

The consequences for the brane cosmological evolution of energy exchange between the brane and the bulk are analyzed in detail, in the context of a non-factorizable background geometry with vanishing effective cosmological constant on the brane. A rich variety of brane cosmologies is obtained, depending on the precise mechanism of energy transfer, the equation of state of brane-matter and the spatial topology. An accelerating era is generically a feature of our solutions. In the case of low-density flat universe more dark matter than in the conventional FRW picture is predicted. Spatially compact solutions are found to delay their re-collapse.