``Critical'' cosmology in higher order gravity (Q1952702)

Summary: We construct the higher order terms of curvatures in Lagrangians of the scale factor in the D-dimensional Robertson-Walker metric, which are linear in the second derivative of the scale factor with respect to cosmic time. It is shown that they are composed of the Lovelock tensors at the first step; iterative construction yields arbitrarily high order terms. The relation to the former work on higher order gravity is discussed. Despite the absence of scalar degrees of freedom in cosmological models which come from our Lagrangian, it is shown that an inflationary behavior of the scale factor can be found. The application to the thick brane solutions is also studied.