Inflation with large supergravity corrections

It is well known that large Hubble-induced supergravity corrections to the inflaton field can ruin the flatness of the potential, thus creating a tension between slow-roll inflation and supergravity. In this paper we show that it is possible to obtain a cosmologically flat direction, embedded within the minimal supersymmetric standard model, despite very large super-Hubble corrections. As an illustration, we show that a flat direction which is lifted by an n = 6 operator matches the current cosmic microwave background data for a wide range of the Hubble parameter, 10(5) GeV less than or similar to H-inf less than or similar to 10(8.5) GeV. Our approach can be applied to any F-term inflationary model.