Single Superfield Inflation: The Trailer

This is amazing. (Via Bob McNees and Michael Nielsen on Twitter.)

Backstory for the puzzled: here is a nice paper that came out last month, on inflation in supergravity.

Inflation in Supergravity with a Single Chiral Superfield
Sergei V. Ketov, Takahiro Terada

We propose new supergravity models describing chaotic Linde- and Starobinsky-like inflation in terms of a single chiral superfield. The key ideas to obtain a positive vacuum energy during large field inflation are (i) stabilization of the real or imaginary partner of the inflaton by modifying a Kahler potential, and (ii) use of the crossing terms in the scalar potential originating from a polynomial superpotential. Our inflationary models are constructed by starting from the minimal Kahler potential with a shift symmetry, and are extended to the no-scale case. Our methods can be applied to more general inflationary models in supergravity with only one chiral superfield.

Supergravity is simply the supersymmetric version of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, but unlike GR (where you can consider just about any old collection of fields to be the “source” of gravity), the constraints of supersymmetry place quite specific requirements on what counts as the “stuff” that creates the gravity. In particular, the allowed stuff comes in the form of “superfields,” which are combinations of boson and fermion fields. So if you want to have inflation within supergravity (which is a very natural thing to want), you have to do a bit of exploring around within the allowed set of superfields to get everything to work. Renata Kallosh and Andrei Linde, for example, have been examining this problem for quite some time.

What Ketov and Terada have managed to do is boil the necessary ingredients down to a minimal amount: just a single superfield. Very nice, and worth celebrating. So why not make a movie-like trailer to help generate a bit of buzz?

Which is just what Takahiro Terada, a PhD student at the University of Tokyo, has done. The link to the YouTube video appeared in an unobtrusive comment in the arxiv page for the revised version of their paper. iMovie provides a template for making such trailers, so it can’t be all that hard to do — but (1) nobody else does it, so, genius, and (2) it’s a pretty awesome job, with just the right touch of humor.

I wouldn’t have paid nearly as much attention to the paper without the trailer, so: mission accomplished. Let’s see if we can’t make this a trend.