Making the Great Desert Bloom

RESUMO

The absence of new physics beyond neutrino masses between the weak scale and the Planck scale is referred to as the great desert. It is often seen as a nightmare scenario for particle physics. Here we argue, by contrast, that the great desert assumption in fact has dramatic implications: it predicts that the Standard Model has a semi-classical AdS$_4$ vacuum with CFT$_3$ dual and, under reasonable assumptions, must be accompanied by at least one extra dimension significantly larger than Planck length. We also present one plausible candidate CFT$_3$ to be ``the" dual to the Standard Model.