Bulk phantom fields, increasing warp factors and fermion localisation

A bulk phantom scalar field (with negative kinetic energy) in a sine--Gordon type potential is used to generate an exact thick brane solution with an increasing warp factor. It is shown that the growing nature of the warp factor allows the localisation of massive as well as massless spin-half fermions on the brane even without any additional non--gravitational interactions. The exact solutions for the localised massive fermionic modes are presented and discussed. The inclusion of a fermion--scalar Yukawa coupling appears to change the mass spectrum and wave functions of the localised fermion though it does not play the crucial role it did in the case of a decreasing warp factor.