Supersymmetry Breaking and Inflation from Higher Curvature Supergravity

TL;DR

This paper explores how higher curvature supergravity models can naturally incorporate inflation and supersymmetry breaking, revealing new vacua and dynamics that connect inflationary behavior with post-inflation supersymmetry breaking.

Contribution

It demonstrates that higher curvature supergravity models can include supersymmetry breaking vacua compatible with inflation, extending previous models with R-symmetry to more general cases.

Findings

New supersymmetry breaking vacua identified

Inflaton driven towards supersymmetry breaking after inflation

Gravitino mass comparable to inflaton mass in these models

Abstract

The generic embedding of the $R+R^2$ higher curvature theory into old-minimal supergravity leads to models with rich vacuum structure in addition to its well-known inflationary properties. When the model enjoys an exact R-symmetry, there is an inflationary phase with a single supersymmetric Minkowski vacuum. This appears to be a special case of a more generic set-up, which in principle may include R-symmetry violating terms which are still of pure supergravity origin. By including the latter terms, we find new supersymmetry breaking vacua compatible with single-field inflationary trajectories. We discuss explicitly two such models and we illustrate how the inflaton is driven towards the supersymmetry breaking vacuum after the inflationary phase. In these models the gravitino mass is of the same order as the inflaton mass. Therefore, pure higher curvature supergravity may not only accommodate the proper inflaton field, but it may also provide the appropriate hidden sector for supersymmetry breaking after inflation has ended.