Large and infinite extra dimensions

The emphasis in the developmet of theories with more than three spatial dimensions has recently shifted towards “brane world” picture, which assumes that ordinary matter (with possible exceptions of gravitons and other, hypothetic, particles which interact very weakly with matter) is trapped to a three-dimensional submanifold --- brane --- embedded in fundamental multi-dimensional space. In the brane world scenario, extra dimensions may be large, and even infinite; they may have effects, directly observable in current or fothcoming experiments. On the basis of simple field-theoretic models, various ideas in this direction are exposed at a non-expert level.