Brane cosmology and motion of test particles in five-dimensional warped product spacetimes

In the braneworld scenario ordinary standard model matter and non-gravitational fields are confined by some trapping mechanism to the 4-dimensional universe constituting the D3-branes which are embedded in a (4 + n)-dimensional manifold referred to as the 'bulk' (n being the number of extra dimensions). The notion of particle confinement is necessary for theories with non-compact extra dimensions, otherwise, the particles would escape from our 4-dimensional world along unseen directions. In this paper, we have considered a five-dimensional warped product space-time having an exponential warping function which depends both on time as well as on the extra coordinates and a non-compact fifth dimension. Assuming that the lapse function may either be a constant or a function of both time and of the extra coordinates, we have studied the nature of the geodesics of test particles and photons and have analyzed the conditions of stability in this geometrical framework. We have also discussed the possible cosmology of the corresponding (3 + 1)-dimensional hypersurfaces.