The nature of the fuel that drives today’s cosmic acceleration is an open and tantalizing mystery. The braneworld theory of Dvali, Gabadadze, and Porrati (DGP) provides a context where late-time acceleration is driven not by some energy-momentum component (dark energy), but rather is the manifestation of the excruciatingly slow leakage of gravity off our four-dimensional world into an extra dim...

These lectures present some topics of string phenomenology and contain two parts. In the first part, I review the possibility of lowering the string scale in the TeV region, that provides a theoretical framework for solving the mass hierarchy problem and unifying all interactions. The apparent weakness of gravity can then be accounted by the existence of large internal dimensions, in the sub-mi...

In this thesis, we explore three alternatives to the current paradigm of the standard inflationary big bang scenario. The three alternative themes are spin torsion (or Einstein-Cartan-Kibble-Sciama) theories, extra dimensions (braneworld cosmology) and changing global symmetry. In the spin torsion theories, we found new cosmological solutions with a cosmological constant as alternative to the s...

This thesis is devoted to studying two important aspects of braneworld physics: their cosmology and their holography. We examine the Einstein equations induced on a general (n − 2)-brane of arbitrary tension, embedded in some n-dimensional bulk. The brane energy-momentum tensor enters these equations both linearly and quadratically. From the point of view of a homogeneous and isotropic brane we...

It has been suggested that codimension-two braneworlds might naturally explain the vanishing of the 4D effective cosmological constant, due to the automatic relation between the deficit angle and the brane tension. To investigate whether this cancellation happens dynamically, and within the context of a realistic cosmology, we study a codimension-two braneworld with spherical extra dimensions c...

According to the braneworld model of gravity by Dvali, Gabadadze and Porrati, our Universe is a four-dimensional space-time brane embedded in a larger, infinite five-dimensional bulk space. Contrary to the other forces constrained to remain on the brane, gravity is able to explore the entire bulk getting substantially modified at large distances. This model has not only cosmological consequence...