Abstract:We analyze the interplay between Kähler moduli stabilization and chaotic inflation in supergravity. While heavy moduli decouple from inflation in the supersymmetric limit, supersymmetry breaking generically introduces non-decoupling effects. These lead to inflation driven by a soft mass term, m 2 ϕ ∼ mm 3/2 , where m is a supersymmetric mass parameter. This scenario needs no stabilizer field, but the stability of moduli during inflation imposes a large supersymmetry breaking scale, m 3/2 H, and a careful choice of initial conditions. This is illustrated in three prominent examples of moduli stabilization: KKLT stabilization, Kähler Uplifting, and the Large Volume Scenario. Remarkably, all models have a universal effective inflaton potential which is flattened compared to quadratic inflation. Hence, they share universal predictions for the CMB observables, in particular a lower bound on the tensor-to-scalar ratio, r 0.05.

Abstract. In this paper we derive constraints on the emission of a massive (pseudo)scalar S from annihilation of neutrinos in the core of supernovae through the dimension-4 coupling ννS, as well as the effective dimension-5 operator 1 Λ (νν)(SS). While most of earlier studies have focused on massless or ultralight scalars, our analysis involves scalar with masses of order eV − GeV which can be copiously produced during the explosion of supernovae, whose core temperature is generally of order T ∼ O(10) MeV. From the luminosity and deleptonization arguments regarding the observation of SN1987A, we exclude a large range of couplings 10 −12 |g αβ | 10 −5 for the dimension-4 case, depending on the neutrino flavours involved and the scalar mass. In the case of dimension-5 operator, for a scalar mass from MeV to 100 MeV the coupling h αβ get constrained from 10 −6 to 10 −2 , with the cutoff scale explicitly set Λ = 1 TeV. We finally show that if the neutrino burst of a nearby supernova explosion is detected by Super-Kamiokande and IceCube, the constraints will be largely reinforced.arXiv:1609.05882v2 [hep-ph]

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Large-field inflation is an interesting and predictive scenario. Its non-trivial embedding in supergravity was intensively studied in the recent literature, whereas its interplay with supersymmetry breaking has been less thoroughly investigated. We consider the minimal viable model of chaotic inflation in supergravity containing a stabilizer field, and add a Polonyi field. Furthermore, we study two possible extensions of the minimal setup. We show that there are various constraints: first of all, it is very hard to couple an O'Raifeartaigh sector with the inflaton sector, the simplest viable option being to couple them only through gravity. Second, even in the simplest model the gravitino mass is bounded from above parametrically by the inflaton mass. Therefore, high-scale supersymmetry breaking is hard to implement in a chaotic inflation setup. As a separate comment we analyze the simplest chaotic inflation construction without a stabilizer field, together with a supersymmetrically stabilized Kähler modulus. Without a modulus, the potential of such a model is unbounded from below. We show that a heavy modulus cannot solve this problem.