On the Super Higgs Effect in Extended Supergravity

We consider the reduction of supersymmetry in N-extended four dimensional supergravity via the super Higgs mechanism in theories without cosmological constant. We provide an analysis largely based on the properties of long and short multiplets of Poincare' supersymmetry. Examples of the super Higgs phenomenon are realized in spontaneously broken N=8 supergravity through the Scherk-Schwarz mechanism and in superstring compactification in presence of brane fluxes. In many models the massive vectors count the difference in number of the translation isometries of the scalar sigma-model geometries in the broken and unbroken phase.