Inflation, de Sitter landscape and super-Higgs effect

Abstract

Abstract: We continue developing cosmological models involving nilpotent chiral super-fields, which provide a simple unified description of inflation and the current acceleration of the universe in the supergravity context. We describe here a general class of models with a positive cosmological constant at the minimum of the potential, such that supersymmetry is spontaneously broken in the direction of the nilpotent superfield S. In the unitary gauge, these models have a simple action where all highly non-linear fermionic terms of the classical Volkov-Akulov action disappear. We present masses for bosons and fermions in these theories. By a proper choice of parameters in this class of models, one can fit any possible set of the inflationary parameters n s and r, a broad range of values of the vacuum energy V 0, which plays the role of the dark energy, and achieve a controllable level of supersymmetry breaking. This can be done without introducing light moduli, such as Polonyi fields, which often lead to cosmological problems in phenomenological supergravity.