A New Mechanism of Dynamical Spontaneous Breaking of Supersymmetry

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel mechanism for spontaneous supersymmetry breaking through a modified supergravity formulation that dynamically generates a small cosmological constant and large gravitino mass, aligning with current cosmological observations.

Contribution

It develops a new supergravity formalism using an alternative volume form, leading to spontaneous supersymmetry breaking and a dynamically generated cosmological constant.

Findings

Dynamically generated cosmological constant as an integration constant

Achieves a small positive cosmological constant

Produces a large gravitino mass compatible with cosmology

Abstract

We present a qualitatively new mechanism for dynamical spontaneous breakdown of supersymmetry. Specifically, we construct a modified formulation of standard minimal N=1 supergravity. The modification is based on an idea worked out in detail in previous publications by some of us, where we proposed a new formulation of (non-supersymmetric) gravity theories employing an alternative volume form (volume element, or generally-covariant integration measure) in the pertinent Lagrangian action, defined in terms of auxiliary (pure-gauge) fields instead of the standard Riemannian metric volume form. Invariance under supersymmetry of the new modified N=1 supergravity action is preserved due to the addition of an appropriate compensating antisymmetric tensor gauge field. This new formalism naturally triggers the appearance of a dynamically generated cosmological constant as an arbitrary integration constant which signifies a spontaneous (dynamical) breaking of supersymmetry. Furthermore, applying the same formalism to anti-de Sitter supergravity allows us to appropriately choose the above mentioned arbitrary integration constant so as to obtain simultaneously a very small positive effective observable cosmological constant as well as a large physical gravitino mass as required by modern cosmological scenarios for slowly expanding universe of today.