Gravity waves and the LHC: Towards high-scale inflation with low-energy SUSY

Understand

It has been argued that rather generic features of string-inspired inflationary theories with low-energy supersymmetry (SUSY) make it difficult to achieve inflation with a Hubble scale H > m_{3/2}, where m_{3/2} is the gravitino mass in the SUSY-breaking vacuum state.

• We present a class of string-inspired supergravity realizations of chaotic inflation where a simple, dynamical mechanism yields hierarchically small scales of post-inflationary supersymmetry breaking.
• Within these toy models we can easily achieve small ratios between m_{3/2} and the Hubble scale of inflation.
• This is possible because the expectation value of the superpotential <W> relaxes from large to small values during the course of inflation.