We study gravity in backgrounds that are smooth generalizations of the Randall-Sundrum model, with and without scalar fields. These generalizations include three-branes in higher dimensional spaces which are not necessarily Anti-de Sitter far from the branes, intersecting brane configurations and configurations involving negative tension branes. We show that under certain mild assumptions there is a universal equation for the gravitational fluctuations. We study both the graviton ground state and the continuum of Kaluza-Klein modes and we find that the four-dimensional gravitational mode is localized precisely when the effects of the continuum modes decouple at distances larger than the fundamental Planck scale. The decoupling is contingent only on the long-range behaviour of the metric from the brane and we find a universal form for the corrections to Newton's Law. We also comment on the possible contribution of resonant modes. Given this, we find general classes of metrics which maintain localized four-dimensional gravity. We find that three-brane metrics in five dimensions can arise from a single scalar field source, and we rederive the BPS type conditions without any a priori assumptions regarding the form of the scalar potential. We also show that a single scalar field cannot produce conformally-flat locally intersecting brane configurations or a p-brane in greater than (p + 2)-dimensions. * J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellow

We describe the modern formalism, ideas and applications of the instanton calculus for gauge theories with, and without, supersymmetry. Particular emphasis is put on developing a formalism that can deal with any number of instantons. This necessitates a thorough review of the ADHM construction of instantons with arbitrary charge and an in-depth analysis of the resulting moduli space of solutions. We review the construction of the ADHM moduli space as a hyper-Kähler quotient. We show how the functional integral in the semi-classical approximation reduces to an integral over the instanton moduli space in each instanton sector and how the resulting matrix partition function involves various geometrical quantities on the instanton moduli space: volume form, connection, curvature, isometries, etc. One important conclusion is that this partition function is the dimensional reduction of a higherdimensional gauged linear sigma model which naturally leads us to describe the relation of the instanton calculus to D-branes in string theory. Along the way we describe powerful applications of the calculus of many instantons to supersymmetric gauge theories including (i) the gluino condensate puzzle in N = 1 theories (ii) Seiberg-Witten theory in N = 2 theories; and (iii) the AdS/CFT correspondence in N = 2 and N = 4 theories. Finally, we brielfy review the modifications of the instanton calculus for a gauge theory defined on a non-commutative spacetime and we also describe a new method for calculating instanton processes using a form of localization on the instanton moduli space.