Inflation with large supergravity corrections

Abstract

It is well known that large Hubble-induced supergravity corrections to the inflaton field can ruin the flatness of the potential, thus creating a tension between slow-roll inflation and supergravity. In this paper we show that it is possible to obtain a {\it cosmologically flat} direction, embedded within the minimal supersymmetric standard model, despite very large super-Hubble corrections. As an illustration, we show that a flat direction which is lifted by an $n=6$ operator matches the current cosmic microwave background data for a wide range of the Hubble parameter, $10^5\mathrm{GeV}\lesssim H_{inf}\lesssim 10^{8.5}$ GeV. Our approach can be applied to any $F$-term inflationary model.

Comments: 5 pages, 1 figure. This version updated to match published version in PRD. Title changed in accordance with journal request