Supergravity from the bottom up

A bstract We employ on-shell methods to construct scattering amplitudes and derive effective theories involving massive spin-3/2 fermions interacting with spin 0, 1 and 2 bosons. The four-point massive amplitudes are constructed using an all-line-transverse momentum shift, assuming that in the massless limit, three-point interactions are smooth and the Ward identity is satisfied. For a Majorana spin-3/2 fermion with mass m 3 / 2 , we show that interactions with only spin 0 and massive spin-1 bosons do not lead to an effective theory valid up to a cutoff Λ ≫ m 3 / 2 that is independent of particle masses. Instead, adding an interaction with a spin-2 graviton gives rise to four-point amplitudes with a Planck scale unitarity cutoff that reproduces well-known results from N = 1 supergravity, such as F -term breaking with a complex scalar and D -term breaking with an additional massive photon. These bottom-up results are then extended to two Majorana spin-3/2 fermions where an interacting effective theory valid up to Λ ≫ m 3 / 2 again requires the introduction of the spin-2 graviton. Unitarity up to the Planck scale is then achieved when the two Majorana spin-3/2 fermions have unequal masses, and necessarily couple to two massive spin-1 states corresponding to the spontaneous breaking of N = 2 supergravity to N = 0. Our results, obtained from the bottom-up and without any Lagrangian, imply that broken supergravity is the unique, effective theory involving interactions of massive spin-3/2 fermions valid up to a cutoff Λ ≫ m 3 / 2 that does not depend on particle masses.