Bent domain walls as braneworlds

We consider domain walls embedded in curved backgrounds as an approximation for braneworld scenarios. We give a large class of new exact solutions, exausting the possibilities for describing one and two walls for the cases where the curvature of both the hulk and the wall are locally constant. In the case of two walls, we find solutions where each wall has positive tension. An interesting property of these solutions is that the curvature of the walls can be much smaller than the tension, leading to a significant cancellation of the effective cosmological constant, which however is still much larger than the observational limits. We further discuss some aspects of inflation in models based on wall solutions. [S0556-2821(99)04122-3].