Gravitating field-theoretical branes and their excitations

This thesis is devoted to studying field-theoretical branes in warped geometries, with emphasis on brane excitations and properties of background solutions. Firstly, we examine the features of a model in which our universe is represented by a local string-like defect embedded in a six-dimensional space-time with warped geometry. We demonstrate that in order to satisfy the dominant energy condition, the metric exterior to the defect's core must depend on its thickness. As a result of this dependence, in the limit of the string's thickness going to zero, either the solution no longer localizes the gravity on the defect, or the ratio of the six-dimensional Planck mass to the four-dimensional one diverges. Next, we propose and study a toy model allowing to investigate the phenomenon of quasilocalization. When applied to gravity, our setup can be seen as a (toy) model of a warped geometry in which the graviton is not fully localized on the brane. Studying the tensor sector of metric perturbations around this background, we find that its contribution to the effective gravitational potential is of four-dimensional type 1/r at intermediate scales and that at large scales it becomes 1/rα, 1