Yang-Mills/Einstein/Tensor Supergravity: Abelian Case

We give a detailed study of the critical points of the potentials of the simplest non-trivial N = 2 gauged Yang-Mills/Einstein supergravity theories with tensor multiplets. The scalar field target space of these examples is SO(1, 1)×SO(2, 1)/SO(2). The possible gauge groups are SO(2)×U(1)R and SO(1, 1) × U(1)R, where U(1)R is a subgroup of the R-symmetry group SU(2)R, and SO(2) and SO(1, 1) are subgroups of the isometry group of the scalar manifold. The scalar potentials of these theories consist of a contribution from the U(1)R gauging and a contribution that is due to the presence of the tensor fields. We find that the latter contribution can change the form of the supersymmetric extrema from maxima to saddle points. In addition, it leads to novel critical points not present in the corresponding gauged Yang-Mills/Einstein supergravity theories without the tensor multiplets. For the SO(2)×U(1)R gauged theory these novel critical points correspond to anti-de Sitter ground states. For the non-compact SO(1, 1)×U(1)R gauging, the novel ground states are de Sitter. The analysis of the critical points of the potential carries over in a straightforward manner to the generic family of N = 2 gauged Yang-Mills/Einstein supergravity theories with tensor multiplets whose scalar manifolds are of the form SO(1, 1)× SO(n− 1, 1)/SO(n− 1). 1 Work supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number PHY-9802510. [email protected] [email protected]