Minimal Higgs Branch for the Breaking of Half of the Supersymmetries in N=2 Supergravity

TL;DR

This paper investigates the minimal Higgs sector necessary for breaking half of the supersymmetries in N=2 supergravity, revealing specific multiplet configurations that lead to a vanishing vacuum energy and a massive spin 3/2 multiplet.

Contribution

It identifies the minimal Higgs hypermultiplet and vector multiplet configurations required for partial supersymmetry breaking in N=2 supergravity.

Findings

Minimal Higgs sector includes hypermultiplet and vector multiplet.

Specific scalar manifolds lead to zero vacuum energy.

Results have potential implications for superstring effective actions.

Abstract

It is shown that the minimal Higgs sector of a generic N=2 supergravity theory with unbroken N=1 supersymmetry must contain a Higgs hypermultiplet and a vector multiplet. When the multiplets parametrize the quaternionic manifold SO(4,1)/SO(4), and the special Kahler manifold SU(1,1)/U(1), respectively, a vanishing vacuum energy with a sliding massive spin 3/2 multiplet is obtained. Potential applications to N=2 low energy effective actions of superstrings are briefly discussed.