Gravitational Waves, mu Term & Leptogenesis from B-L Higgs Inflation in Supergravity

Abstract: We consider a renormalizable extension of the minimal supersymmetric standard model endowed by an R and a gauged B - L symmetry. The model incorporates chaotic inflation driven by a quartic potential, associated with the Higgs field which leads to a spontaneous breaking of U(1)B-L, and yields possibly detectable gravitational waves. We employ quadratic Kahler potentials with a prominent shift-symmetric part proportional to c- and a tiny violation, proportional to c+, included in a logarithm with prefactor -N<0. It also offers an explanation of mu term of the MSSM provided that one related parameter in the superpotential is somewhat small. Baryogenesis occurs via non-thermal leptogenesis which is realized by the inflaton's decay to the lightest or next-to-lightest right-handed neutrino with masses lower than 1.8x10^13 GeV. Our scenario can be confronted with the current data on the inflationary observables, the baryon asymmetry of the universe, the gravitino limit on the reheating temperature and the data on the neutrino oscillation parameters, for 0.012<=c+/c-<1/N and gravitino as light as 1 TeV.