  A generic F-theory compactification containing many D3 branes develops
multiple brane throats. The interaction of observers residing inside different
throats involves tunneling suppression and, as a result, is very weak. This
suggests a new mechanism for generating small numbers in Nature. One
application is to the hierarchy problem: large supersymmetry breaking near the
unification scale inside a shallow throat causes TeV-scale SUSY-breaking inside
the standard-model throat. Another application, inspired by nuclear-decay, is
in designing naturally long-lived particles: a cold dark matter particle
residing near the standard model brane decays to an approximate CFT-state of a
longer throat within a Hubble time. This suggests that most of the mass of the
universe today could consist of CFT-matter and may soften structure formation
at sub-galactic scales. The tunneling calculation demonstrates that the
coupling between two throats is dominated by higher dimensional modes and
consequently is much larger than a naive application of holography might
suggest.
