A naturally light dilaton and a small cosmological constant

We present a non-supersymmetric theory with a naturally light dilaton. It is based on a 5D holographic description of a conformal theory perturbed by a close-to marginal operator of dimension 4-ε which develops a condensate. As long as the dimension of the perturbing operator remains very close to marginal (even for large couplings) a stable minimum at hierarchically small scales is achieved, where the dilaton mass squared is suppressed by ε. At the same time the cosmological constant in this sector is also suppressed by ε, and thus it is parametrically smaller than in a broken SUSY theory. As a byproduct we also present an exact solution to the scalar-gravity system that can be interpreted as a newholographic realization of spontaneously broken conformal symmetry. Even though this metric deviates substantially from AdS space in the deep IR it still describes a non-linearly realized exactly conformal theory. We also display the effective potential for the dilaton for arbitrary holographic backgrounds. (orig.)