A brane world model with intersecting branes

A brane world model is investigated, in which there are many branes that ma y intersect and self-intersect. One of the branes, being a 3-brane, represe nts our spacetime, while the other branes, if they intersect our brane worl d, manifest themselves as matter in our 3-brane. It is shown that such a ma tter encompasses dust of point particles and higher-dimensional p-branes, a nd all those objects follow "geodesics" in the world volume swept by our 3- brane. We also point point out that such a model can be formulated in a bac kground independent way, and that the kinetic term for gravity arises from quantum fluctuation of the brane. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.