Superconformal symmetry, supergravity and cosmology

By R. Kallosh, Lev Kofman, Andrei Linde, A. Proeyen. 2000

176 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We introduce the general N = 1 gauge theory superconformally coupled to supergravity. The theory has local SU(2,2|1) symmetry and no dimensional parameters. The superconformal origin of the Fayet-Iliopoulos (FI) terms is clarified. The phase of this theory with spontaneously broken conformal symmetry gives various formulations of N = 1 supergravity interacting with matter, depending on the choice of the R-symmetry fixing. We have found that the locally superconformal theory is useful for describing the physics of the early universe with a conformally flat FRW metric. Few applications of superconformal theory to cosmology include the study of (a) particle production after inflation, particularly the nonconformal helicity-±½ states of gravitino, (b) the super-Higgs effect in cosmology and the derivation of the equations for the gravitino interacting with any number of chiral and vector multiplets in the gravitational background with varying scalar fields, (c) the weak-coupling limit of supergravity MP→∞ and gravitino-goldstino equivalence. This explains why gravitino production in the early universe is not suppressed in the limit of weak gravitational coupling. We discuss the possible existence of an unbroken phase of the superconformal theories, interpreted as a strong-coupling limit of supergravity MP→0.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fce83fce55e2fe1f8722a37ba9920b443b8552b8

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Citations in the corpus

Non-minimal Inflationary Attractors (2013, methodology): “The superconformal approach to supergravity in the form employed in [7] is described in detail in the recent book by Freedman and Van Proeyen [9], where one can find also the references to the original work.”
From ten to four and back again: how to generalize the geometry (2007, methodology): “Let us indicate the chiral fields with φ and use conventions similar to [25] for writing complex conjugated quantities, e.”
Comments on supercurrent multiplets, supersymmetric field theories and supergravity (2010, background): “This reproduces the results of [12-14] which was derived in the old minimal formalism about the coupling of R-symmetric theories with an FI-term to supergravity.”
Gaugino Condensates and D-terms from D7-branes (2006, unknown): “2.1 The setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 2.2 From DBI to D-terms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .”
Reheating in Inflationary Cosmology: Theory and Applications (2010, background): “[90] Maroto AL, Mazumdar A, “Production of spin 3/2 particles from vacuum fluctuations,” Phys.”
Superconformal generalization of the chaotic inflation model (2013, background): “The complete gravity-scalar part4 of the SU(2, 2|1) invariant superconformal action [10, 12, 20] has a gravity part, kinetic terms for scalars and a potential.”
The effective theory of type IIA AdS4 compactifications on nilmanifolds and cosets (2008, methodology): “Here we will follow the approach of [32], which calculated the superpotential and the (conformal) Kähler potential in the superconformal formalism of [67].”