Princeton University/Institute for Advanced Study Early Universe/Cosmology Lunch Discussion

Organizers are David Spergel, Princeton University, and Matias Zaldarriaga, Institute for Advanced Study. The lunch will be held at either Princeton University or the Institute for Advance Study. Check the calendar for the meeting location. This week's meeting is at the Institute for Advanced Study. Attendees can bring their own lunch or stop at the IAS Dining Hall. The West Seminar room is in a building which is a short walk from the main dining area. ABSTRACT: We discuss the possibility that inflation is driven by the sgoldstino, the superpartner of the goldstino. Unlike in generic supergravity scenarios, the sgoldstino decouples from all other fields in the theory, which allows for a simple and robust inflationary model. We argue that the two-field model given by this single complex scalar correctly captures the full multifield inflationary phenomenology. On the other hand, the assumption of stability, along the entire inflationary trajectory, of the supersymmetry--preserving sector that is integrated out leads to supplementary constraints on the parent supergravity. We investigate small field, large field and hybrid sgoldstino inflation scenarios and provide some working examples. They are subject to the usual fine-tuning issues that are common to all supergravity models of inflation.