Unconventional cosmology on the (thick) brane

We consider the cosmology of a thick codimension 1 brane. We obtain the matching conditions leading to the cosmological evolution equations and show that when one includes matter with a pressure component along the extra dimension in the brane energy–momentum tensor, the cosmology is of non-standard type. In particular one can get acceleration when a dust of non-relativistic matter particles is the only source for the (modified) Friedman equation. Our equations would seem to violate the conservation of energy–momentum from a 4D perspective, but in 5D the energy–momentum is conserved. One could write down an effective conserved 4D energy–momentum tensor attaching a 'dark energy' component to the energy–momentum tensor of matter that has pressure along the extra dimension. This extra component could, on a cosmological scale, be interpreted as matter-coupled quintessence. We comment on the effective 4D description of this effect in terms of the time evolution of a scalar field (the 5D radion) coupled to this kind of matter.