A Comment on the Cosmological Constant Problem in Spontaneously Broken Supergravity

Abstract

In spontaneously broken supergravity with non-flat potential the vanishing of the cosmological constant is usually associated with a non-trivial balancing of two opposite-sign contributions. We make the simple observation that, in an appropriately defined expansion of the superfield action in inverse powers of $M_P$, this tuning corresponds to the absence of two specific operators. It is then tempting to speculate what kind of non-standard symmetry or structural principle might underlie the observed extreme smallness of the corresponding coefficients in the real world. Independently of such speculations, the suggested expansion appears to be a particularly simple and convenient starting point for the effective field theory analysis of spontaneously broken supergravity models.