Mass hierarchy and trappings of gravity

We construct a model consisting of many D3-branes with only positive tension in a five-dimensional anti-de Sitter space-time geometry. It is shown that this type of model naturally realizes not only exponential mass hierarchy between the Planck scale and the electroweak scale but also trapping of the graviton on the D3-branes. It is pointed out that our model may have a flexibility to explain the existence of more than one disparate mass scales, such as the electroweak scale and the GUT scale, on the same D3-brane. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.