Minimal Higgs Branch for the Breaking of Half of the Supersymmetries in N=2 Supergravity

It is shown that the minimal Higgs sector of a generic N=2 supergravity theory with unbroken N=1 supersymmetry must contain a Higgs hypermultiplet and a vector multiplet. When the multiplets parametrize the quaternionic manifold SO(4,1)/SO(4), and the special Kahler manifold SU(1,1)/U(1), respectively, a vanishing vacuum energy with a sliding massive spin 3/2 multiplet is obtained. Potential applications to N=2 low energy effective actions of superstrings are briefly discussed.