On dilatons and the LHC diphoton excess

We study soft wall models that can embed the standard model and a naturally light dilaton. exploiting the full capabilities of these models we identify the parameter space that allows to pass electroweak precision tests with a moderate kaluza-klein scale, around 2 tev. we analyze the coupling of the dilaton with standard model (sm) fields in the bulk, and discuss two applications: i) models with a light dilaton as the first particle beyond the sm pass quite easily all observational tests even with a dilaton lighter than the higgs. however the possibility of a 125 gev dilaton as a higgs impostor is essentially disfavored; ii) we show how to extend the soft wall models to realize a 750 gev dilaton that could explain the recently reported diphoton excess at the lhc.