Quantum horizons of the standard model landscape

The long-distance effective field theory of our Universe--the Standard Modelcoupled to gravity--has a unique 4D vacuum, but we show that it also has alandscape of lower-dimensional vacua, with the potential for moduli arisingfrom vacuum and Casimir energies. For minimal Majorana neutrino masses, we finda near-continuous infinity of AdS3xS1 vacua, with circumference ~20 microns andAdS3 length 4x10^25 m. By AdS/CFT, there is a CFT2 of central charge c~10^90which contains the Standard Model (and beyond) coupled to quantum gravity inthis vacuum. Physics in these vacua is the same as in ours for energies between10^-1 eV and 10^48 GeV, so this CFT2 also describes all the physics of ourvacuum in this energy range. We show that it is possible to realizequantum-stabilized AdS vacua as near-horizon regions of new kinds of quantumextremal black objects in the higher-dimensional space--near critical blackstrings in 4D, near-critical black holes in 3D. The violation of thenull-energy condition by the Casimir energy is crucial for these horizons toexist, as has already been realized for analogous non-extremal 3D black holesby Emparan, Fabbri and Kaloper. The new extremal 3D black holes areparticularly interesting--they are (meta)stable with an entropy independent ofhbar and G_N, so a microscopic counting of the entropy may be possible in theG_N->0 limit. Our results suggest that it should be possible to realize thelarger landscape of AdS vacua in string theory as near-horizon geometries ofnew extremal black brane solutions.Comment: 44 pages, 9 figure