Cosmic No Hair for Braneworlds with a Bulk Dilaton Field

Braneworld cosmology supported by a bulk scalar field with an exponential potential is developed. A general class of separable backgrounds for both single and two-brane systems is derived, where the bulk metric components are given by products of world-volume and bulk coordinates and the world-volumes represent any anisotropic and inhomogeneous solution to an effective four-dimensional Brans-Dicke theory of gravity. We deduce a cosmic no hair theorem for all ever expanding, spatially homogeneous Bianchi world-volumes and find that the spatially flat and isotropic inflationary scaling solution represents a late-time attractor when the bulk potential is sufficiently flat. The dependence of this result on the separable nature of the bulk metric is investigated by applying the techniques of Hamilton-Jacobi theory to five-dimensional Einstein gravity. We employ the spatial gradient expansion method to determine the asymptotic form of the bulk metric up to third-order in spatial gradients. It is found that the condition for the separable form of the metric to represent the attractor of the system is precisely the same as that for the four-dimensional world-volume to isotropize. We also derive the fourth-order contribution to the Hamilton-Jacobi generating functional. Finally, we conclude by placing our results within the context of the holographic approach to braneworld cosmology