Supersymmetry, Cosmological Constant and Inflation: Towards a fundamental cosmic picture via "running vacuum"

Abstract

On the occasion of a century from the proposal of General relativity by Einstein, I attempt to tackle some open issues in modern cosmology, via a toy but non-trivial model. Specifically, I would like to link together: (i) the smallness of the cosmological constant today, (ii) the evolution of the universe from an inflationary era after the big-bang till now, and (iii) local supersymmetry in the gravitational sector (supergravity) with a broken spectrum at early eras, by making use of the concept of the "running vacuum" in the context of a simple toy model of four-dimensional N=1 supergravity. The model is characterised by dynamically broken local supersymmetry, induced by the formation of gravitino condensates in the early universe. As I will argue, there is a Starobinsky-type inflationary era characterising the broken supersymmetry phase in this model, which is compatible with the current cosmological data, provided a given constraint is satisfied among some tree-level parameters of the model and the renormalised cosmological constant of the de Sitter background used in the analysis. Applying the "running vacuum" concept, then, to the effective field theory at the exit of inflation, makes a smooth connection (in cosmic time) with the radiation dominance epoch and subsequently with the current era of the Universe, characterised by a small (but dominant) cosmological-constant contribution to the cosmic energy density. In this approach, the smallness of the cosmological constant today is attributed to the failure (due to quantum gravity non-perturbative effects) of the aforementioned constraint.

18 pages latex, four pdf figures incorporated, uses special macros. Invited plenary talk at the 4th ICNFP 2015, 23-30 August 2015 (Kolymbari, Crete, Greece). The talk reviews material from arXiv:1312.5197, arXiv:1409.3183, arXiv:1505.04434. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1412.6437

References in corpus (8)

• The Standard Model Higgs boson as the inflaton
• From Linear SUSY to Constrained Superfields
• Superconformal Symmetry, NMSSM, and Inflation
• Dark energy: a quantum fossil from the inflationary Universe?
• Chaotic Inflation in Supergravity after Planck and BICEP2
• Starobinsky-type Inflation in Dynamical Supergravity Breaking Scenarios
• Complexified Starobinsky Inflation in Supergravity in the Light of Recent BICEP2 Result
• Inflation via Gravitino Condensation in Dynamically Broken Supergravity

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Unified Dark Energy and Dark Matter from Dynamical Space Time
• Consequences of energy conservation violation: Late time solutions of $\Lambda (T)CDM$ subclass of $f(R,T)$ gravity using dynamical system approach
• A Cyclic Universe With Varying Cosmological Constant in $f(R,T)$ gravity
• A stable flat universe with variable Cosmological constant in f(R,T) Gravity
• Dynamical systems of cosmological models for different possibilities of $G$ and ${\rho }_{\Lambda }$
• Thermalon mediated AdS to dS phase transitions in Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet-massive gravity