  There is nothing to prevent a higher-dimensional anti-de Sitter bulk
spacetime from containing various other branes in addition to hosting our
universe, presumed to be a positive-tension 3-brane. In particular, it could
contain closed, microscopic branes that form the boundary surfaces of void
bubbles and thus violate the null energy condition in the bulk. The possible
existence of such micro branes can be investigated by considering the
properties of the ground state of a pseudo-Wheeler-DeWitt equation describing
brane quantum dynamics in minisuperspace. If they exist, a concentration of
these micro branes could act as a fluid of exotic matter able to support
macroscopic wormholes connecting otherwise distant regions of the bulk. Were
the brane constituting our universe to expand into a region of the bulk
containing such higher-dimensional macroscopic wormholes, they would likely
manifest themselves in our brane as wormholes of normal dimensionality, whose
spontaneous appearance and general dynamics would seem inexplicably peculiar.
This encounter could also result in the formation of baby universes of a
particular type.
