Dynamical Supergravity Breaking via the Super-Higgs Effect Revisited

We investigate the dynamical breaking of local supersymmetry (supergravity), including the Deser-Zumino super-Higgs effect, via the corresponding one-loop effective potential for the simple but quite representative cases of N=1, D=4 simple supergravity and a (simplified) conformal version of it. We find solutions to the effective equations which indicate dynamical generation of a gravitino mass, thus breaking supergravity. In the case of conformal supergravity models, the gravitino mass can be much lower than the Planck scale, for global supersymmetry breaking scales below the Grand Unification scale. The absence of instabilities in the effective potential arising from the quantum fluctuations of the metric field is emphasised, contrary to previous claims in the literature