Low Energy Supergravity Revisited (I)

General forms of the K\"ahler and superpotenials that lead to consistent low energy broken Supersymmetry originating from $N=1$ Supergravity have been classified and used for model building since more than three decades. We point out the incompleteness of this classification when hidden sector vacuum expectation values are of the order of the Planck mass. Focusing in this paper mainly on the case of minimal K\"ahler potential, we adopt a rigorous approach that retrieves on the one hand the known forms, and demonstrate on the other hand the existence of a whole set of new forms for the superpotential of which we give a complete classification. The latter forms involve a new type of chiral superfields having the unusual property of belonging neither to the hidden sector nor to the conventional observable sector. Comparing the obtained forms with the conventional ones, we argue how new possibilities for model building can arise, and discuss the gravity mediation of soft as well as additional hard (but parametrically small) Supersymmetry breaking, in the presence of the new type of chiral superfields. In the simplest case, we study the vacuum structure, characterize the masses and couplings of the scalar components to the hidden and observable sectors and discuss briefly the physical role they could play. In the generic case, we estimate the magnitude and possible consequences of the hard breaking of Supersymmetry in terms of the interplay between hidden and visible sectors mass scales.