Elimination of unitarily nonequivalent vacua in supersymmetric grand unified theories by gravity

Abstract In globally supersymmetric grand unified theories, there may be unitarily nonequivalent vacua which are not present in ordinary theories, reflecting the invariance of the Higgs potential under the complex extension of the gauge group. We show that such vacua are eliminated in the presence of N = 1 supergravity coupling, if local supersymmetry is broken and the costomological constant vanishes.