Cosmological Dynamics of Brane Models and Vacuum Effects

The imposition of boundary conditions on the background fields of brane-world models leads to nonzero vacuum averages for the corresponding energy-momentum tensor. Methods from the qualitative theory of dynamic systems are used in this paper to study the cosmological evolution generated by this tensor. All the possible types of cosmological dynamics are examined for models with homogeneous and isotropic subspaces on the branes and the behavior of the corresponding solutions is studied in the early and late stages of evolution.