On inflation, cosmological constant, and SUSY breaking

TL;DR

This paper explores a broad class of inflationary models with two superfields, demonstrating how adding a nilpotent superfield can break SUSY and generate a small cosmological constant without altering inflationary predictions.

Contribution

It introduces a method to incorporate SUSY breaking and a small cosmological constant into existing inflationary models using a nilpotent superfield.

Findings

SUSY can be broken without affecting inflationary potential.

A small cosmological constant can be introduced via a nilpotent superfield.

The models remain consistent with Planck data.

Abstract

We consider a broad class of inflationary models of two unconstrained chiral superfields, the stabilizer $S$ and the inflaton $\Phi$, which can describe inflationary models with nearly arbitrary potentials. These models include, in particular, the recently introduced theories of cosmological attractors, which provide an excellent fit to the latest Planck data. We show that by adding to the superpotential of the fields $S$ and $\Phi$ a small term depending on a nilpotent chiral superfield $P$ one can break SUSY and introduce a small cosmological constant without affecting main predictions of the original inflationary scenario.