Hidden Superconformal Symmetry of the Cosmological Evolution

Abstract

In the superconformal formulation of supergravity, the standard supergravity action appears as a result of spontaneous symmetry breaking when the conformal compensator scalar field, the conformon, acquires a nonzero value, giving rise to the Planck mass. After that, many symmetries of the original theory become well hidden, and therefore they are often ignored. However, recent developments demonstrated that superconformal invariance is more than just a tool: it plays an important role in generalizing previously existing formulations of supergravity and developing new classes of inflationary models. In this paper we describe hidden superconformal symmetry of the cosmological evolution. In this formulation, inflation can be equivalently described as the conformon instability, and creation of the universe `from nothing' can be interpreted as spontaneous symmetry breaking due to emergence of a classical conformon field. We develop a general formalism that allows to describe the cosmological evolution simultaneously with the evolution of the conformon. We find a set of gauge invariant physical observables, including the superconformally invariant generalizations of the square of the Weyl tensor, which are necessary for invariant description of the cosmological singularities.

22 pages, the version to appear in JCAP. The section on Weyl invariants and the cosmological singularity is extended

References in corpus (3)

• Superconformal Inflationary $\alpha$-Attractors
• Superconformal Symmetry, NMSSM, and Inflation
• Journeys Through Antigravity?

Cited by in corpus (15)

• A Critical Review of Classical Bouncing Cosmologies
• Large Field Inflation and Double $\alpha$-Attractors
• Transformations between Jordan and Einstein frames: Bounces, antigravity, and crossing singularities
• Sailing through the big crunch-big bang transition
• Duality between static spherically or hyperbolically symmetric solutions and cosmological solutions in scalar-tensor gravity
• Inflation, Symmetry, and B-Modes
• Journeys Through Antigravity?
• Bianchi-I cosmological model and crossing singularities
• Conformal Inflation Coupled to Matter
• Illustrating SUSY breaking effects on various inflation mechanisms
• Singularity crossing, transformation of matter properties and the problem of parametrization in field theories
• Dark matter and Standard Model reheating from conformal GUT inflation
• Local Conformal Instability and Local Non-Collapsing in the Ricci flow of Quantum Spacetime
• Conceptual and technical challenges of quantum gravity
• Local Scale Invariant Kaluza-Klein Reduction