Quintessential brane cosmology -: art. no. 044002

We study a class of braneworlds where the cosmological evolution arises as the result of the movement of a three-brane in a five-dimensional static dilatonic bulk, with and without reflection symmetry. The resulting four-dimensional Friedmann equation includes a term which, for a certain range of the parameters, effectively works as a quintessence component, producing an acceleration of the universe at late times. Using current observations and bounds derived from big-bang nucleosynthesis, we estimate the parameters that characterize the model.