Ghostbusters in $f(R)$ supergravity

Abstract

$f(R)$ supergravity is known to contain a ghost mode associated with higher-derivative terms if it contains $R^n$ with $n$ greater than two.We remove the ghost in $f(R)$ supergravity by introducing auxiliary gauge field to absorb the ghost. We dub this method as the ghostbuster mechanism~\cite{Fujimori:2016udq}. We show that the mechanism removes the ghost supermultiplet but also terms including $R^n$ with $n\geq3$, after integrating out auxiliary degrees of freedom. For pure supergravity case, there appears an instability in the resultant scalar potential. We then show that the instability of the scalar potential can be cured by introducing matter couplings in such a way that the system has a stable potential.