Metastable spontaneous breaking of N=2 supersymmetry

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that metastable spontaneous breaking of N=2 supersymmetry is possible without Fayet-Iliopoulos terms, revealing new conditions for supersymmetry breaking and de Sitter vacua in supergravity theories.

Contribution

It shows that metastable N=2 supersymmetry breaking can occur in simple theories without Fayet-Iliopoulos terms, expanding understanding of supersymmetry breaking mechanisms.

Findings

Metastable supersymmetry breaking vacua can arise with curved hyper-Kahler and special-Kahler geometries.

All scalars can be massive, with the lightest lighter than the vector boson.

Metastable de Sitter vacua can exist in N=2 supergravity with Abelian gaugings and no Fayet-Iliopoulos terms.

Abstract

We show that contrary to the common lore it is possible to spontaneously break N=2 supersymmetry even in simple theories without constant Fayet-Iliopoulos terms. We consider the most general N=2 supersymmetric theory with one hypermultiplet and one vector multiplet without Fayet-Iliopoulos terms, and show that metastable supersymmetry breaking vacua can arise if both the hyper-Kahler and the special-Kahler geometries are suitably curved. We then also prove that while all the scalars can be massive, the lightest one is always lighter than the vector boson. Finally, we argue that these results also directly imply that metastable de Sitter vacua can exist in N=2 supergravity theories with Abelian gaugings and no Fayet-Iliopoulos terms, again contrary to common lore, at least if the cosmological constant is sufficiently large.