Clockwork without supersymmetry

Understand

The clockwork mechanism would be completely spoiled by the presence of a cosmological constant in the bulk of its 5D construction, or by analogous terms in the discrete case.

• It is believed that supersymmetry is required to forbid the appearance of these fatal terms, thus apparently tying the fate of the clockwork to the presence of supersymmetry.
• In this letter we argue that a robust clockwork can be obtained also without supersymmetry, by providing a model for the clockwork/linear dilaton EFT where this protection is instead related to diffeomorphism invariance in a higher number of extra dimensions.
• We show that the clockwork mechanism is a quite general setup that emerges, rather minimally, from pure gravity in the presence of $D-5$ additional flat extra dimensions.