Inflation via Gravitino Condensation in Dynamically Broken Supergravity
  Gravitino-condensate-induced inflation via the super-Higgs effect is a
UV-motivated scenario for both inflating the early universe and breaking local
supersymmetry dynamically, entirely independent of any coupling to external
matter. As an added benefit, this also removes the (as of yet unobserved)
massless Goldstino associated to global supersymmetry breaking from the
particle spectrum. In this review we detail the pertinent properties and
outline previously hidden details of the various steps required in this context
in order to make contact with current inflationary phenomenology. The class of
models of SUGRA we use to exemplify our approach are minimal four-dimensional
N=1 supergravity and conformal extensions thereof (with broken conformal
symmetry). Therein, the gravitino condensate itself can play the role of the
inflaton, however the requirement of slow-roll necessitates unnaturally large
values of the wave-function renormalisation. Nevertheless, there is an
alternative scenario that may provide Starobinsky-type inflation, occurring in
the broken-SUGRA phase around the non-trivial minima of the
gravitino-condensate effective potential. In this scenario higher curvature
corrections to the effective action, crucial for the onset of an inflationary
phase, arise as a result of integrating out massive quantum gravitino fields in
the path integral. The latter scenario is compatible with Planck satellite
phenomenology but not with BICEP2 data.
