Duality and spontaneously broken supergravity in flat backgrounds Original Research Article

It is shown that the super Higgs mechanism that occurs in a wide class of models with vanishing cosmological constant (at the classical level) is obtained by the gauging of a flat group which must be an electric subgroup of the duality group. If the residual massive gravitinos which occur in the partial supersymmetry breaking are BPS saturated, then the flat group is nonabelian. This is so for all the models obtained by a Scherk–Schwarz supersymmetry breaking mechanism. If gravitinos occur in long multiplets, then the flat groups may be abelian. This is the case of supersymmetry breaking by string compactifications on an orientifold T6/Z2 with nontrivial brane fluxes.