Inflation and Supersymmetry Breaking in Higgs-$R^2$ Supergravity

TL;DR

This paper develops a supergravity model for Higgs-$R^2$ inflation, demonstrating how dual superfields enable a consistent inflationary scenario up to the Planck scale and addressing supersymmetry breaking effects.

Contribution

It introduces a UV-complete supergravity framework for Higgs-$R^2$ inflation using dual chiral superfields, resolving tachyonic issues and analyzing supersymmetry breaking transmission.

Findings

Dual superfields contain the scalaron and sigma fields, unitarizing Higgs inflation.

Successful slow-roll inflation is possible with higher curvature terms.

Supersymmetry breaking effects are transmitted via dual superfield couplings.

Abstract

We propose a new construction of the supergravity inflation as an UV completion of the Higgs-$R^2$ inflation. In the dual description of $R^2$-supergravity, we show that there appear dual chiral superfields containing the scalaron or sigma field in the Starobinsky inflation, which unitarizes the supersymmetric Higgs inflation with a large non-minimal coupling up to the Planck scale. We find that a successful slow-roll inflation is achievable in the Higgs-sigma field space, but under the condition that higher curvature terms are introduced to cure the tachyonic mass problems for spectator singlet scalar fields. We also discuss supersymmetry breaking and its transmission to the visible sector as a result of the couplings of the dual chiral superfields and the non-minimal gravity coupling of the Higgs fields.