Cosmology with orthogonal nilpotent superfields

The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. We study the application of a supersymmetric model with two constrained supermultiplets to inflationary cosmology. The first superfield S is a stabilizer chiral superfield satisfying a nilpotency condition of degree 2, S 2 ¼ 0. The second superfield Φ is the inflaton chiral superfield, which can be combined into a real superfield B ≡ 1 2i ðΦ − ¯ ΦÞ. The real superfield B is orthogonal to S, SB ¼ 0, and satisfies a nilpotency condition of degree 3, B 3 ¼ 0. We show that these constraints remove from the spectrum the complex scalar sgoldstino, the real scalar inflaton partner (i.e. the " sinflaton "), and the fermionic inflatino. The corresponding supergravity model with de Sitter vacua describes a graviton, a massive gravitino, and one real scalar inflaton, with both the goldstino and inflatino being absent in unitary gauge. We also discuss relaxed superfield constraints where S 2 ¼ 0 and S ¯ Φ is chiral, which removes the sgoldstino and inflatino, but leaves the sinflaton in the spectrum. The cosmological model building in both of these inflatino-less models offers some advantages over existing constructions.