Gravity induced symmetry breaking and ground state of local supersymmetric GUTs

It is shown that local supersymmetry does not necessarily imply existence of anti-de Sitter vacua in grand unified theories. A locally supersymmetric SU(5) grand unified example is presented in which the supergravity interactions make the SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1) vacuum be the absolute minimum of the effective potential for a class of solutions whose Higgs and matter multiplets have no vacuum expectation values in the global limit (kappa -> 0). Supersymmetry breaking occurs at a scale msub(s) approx.= 1 TeV through super Higgs effect and degeneracy is broken by O(msub(s)4) rather than O(kappa2M6). (orig.)