Hidden Superconformal Symmetry of the Cosmological Evolution
  In the superconformal formulation of supergravity, the standard supergravity
action appears as a result of spontaneous symmetry breaking when the conformal
compensator scalar field, the conformon, acquires a nonzero value, giving rise
to the Planck mass. After that, many symmetries of the original theory become
well hidden, and therefore they are often ignored. However, recent developments
demonstrated that superconformal invariance is more than just a tool: it plays
an important role in generalizing previously existing formulations of
supergravity and developing new classes of inflationary models. In this paper
we describe hidden superconformal symmetry of the cosmological evolution. In
this formulation, inflation can be equivalently described as the conformon
instability, and creation of the universe `from nothing' can be interpreted as
spontaneous symmetry breaking due to emergence of a classical conformon field.
We develop a general formalism that allows to describe the cosmological
evolution simultaneously with the evolution of the conformon. We find a set of
gauge invariant physical observables, including the superconformally invariant
generalizations of the square of the Weyl tensor, which are necessary for
invariant description of the cosmological singularities.
