Gravitational Lensing in Brane World Models.

This bending of light rays by large scale structures such as black holes, galaxies and stars are called gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing has become a powerful tool in understanding the structure of the Universe. One of the major issues unsolved in theoretical physics is a model for a consistent theory of quantum gravity. There are several models proposed for “quantum theory of gravity”. One of the proposals that has caught much interest among researches is the “Brane World Model”. The Brane World scenario leads to the fascinating possibility of the existence of large extra spatial dimensions for our universe. Here, our universe which is considered to be 4-dimensional (3 space + 1 time) is a brane embedded in a five dimensional world. In this model the standard model fields are confined to the brane, while gravity can propagate along the extra dimensions. In such a model the gravitational lensing properties differ from the properties observed in usual 4-dimen-sional models. In this work we present all lensing properties of Brane World model space-times such as image positions, apparent brightness, image distortions etc