Perturbative Stability along the Supersymmetric Directions of the Landscape

TL;DR

This paper investigates the perturbative stability of non-supersymmetric configurations in supergravity models, showing how certain couplings can stabilize spectator fields and analyzing implications for string compactifications and de Sitter vacua.

Contribution

It introduces a statistical framework to analyze the stability of spectator sectors in supergravity, revealing conditions for stabilization and new stable de Sitter minima.

Findings

Spectator sector stability can be achieved through non-generic couplings.

Large regions of parameter space favor stable supersymmetric sectors.

Identifies a new stable de Sitter regime without large mass hierarchies.

Abstract

We consider the perturbative stability of non-supersymmetric configurations in N=1 supergravity models with a spectator sector not involved in supersymmetry breaking. Motivated by the supergravity description of complex structure moduli in Large Volume Compactifications of type IIB-superstrings, we concentrate on models where the interactions are consistent with the supersymmetric truncation of the spectator fields, and we describe their couplings by a random ensemble of generic supergravity theories. We characterise the mass spectrum of the spectator fields in terms of the statistical parameters of the ensemble and the geometry of the scalar manifold. Our results show that the non-generic couplings between the spectator and the supersymmetry breaking sectors can stabilise all the tachyons which typically appear in the spectator sector before including the supersymmetry breaking effects, and we find large regions of the parameter space where the supersymmetric sector remains stable with probability close to one. We discuss these results about the stability of the supersymmetric sector in two physically relevant situations: non-supersymmetric Minkowski vacua, and slow-roll inflation driven by the supersymmetry breaking sector. For the class of models we consider, we have reproduced the regimes in which the KKLT and Large Volume Scenarios stabilise all supersymmetric moduli. We have also identified a new regime in which the supersymmetric sector is stabilised at a very robust type of dS minimum without invoking a large mass hierarchy.