Appeasing the phantom menace?

Abstract

An induced gravity brane-world model is considered herein. A Gauss-Bonnet term is provided for the bulk, whereas phantom matter is present on the brane. It is shown that a combination of infra-red and ultra-violet modifications to general relativity replaces a big rip singularity: A sudden singularity emerges instead. Using current observational data, we also determine a range of values for the cosmic time corresponding to the sudden singularity occurrence.