An Alternative to Matter Localization in the “Brane World”: An Early Proposal and its Later Improvements

Here we place the Latex typeset of the paper M. Pavšič, Phys. Lett. A 116, 1–5 (1986) In the paper we presented the picture that our spacetime is a 3-brane moving in a higher dimensional space. The dynamical equations were derived from the action which is just that for the usual Dirac–Nambu–Goto p-brane. We also considered the case where not only one, but many branes of various dimensionalities are present, and showed that their intersections with the 3-brane manifest as matter in 4-dimensional spacetime. We considered a particular case, where the intersections behaved as point particles, and found out that they follow the geodesics on the 3-brane worldsheet (identified with our spacetime). In a series of subsequent papers the original idea has been further improved and developped. This is discussed in a note at the end, where it is also pointed out that such a model resolves the problem of massive matter confinement on the brane, recently discussed by Rubakov et al. and Mück et al. .