Energy and supercharge in higher derivative gravity

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Explicit energy expressions are derived, by supergravity embedding, for quadratic curvature actions with or without Einstein terms. Applications include existence of stability domains in R+ R 2 models, vanishing of supercharge in conformal supergravity and indefiniteness of the energy in the generic case. The contradiction between the indefiniteness of the energy and its seemingly positive supersymmetric H= ΣQ α 2 form is traced to the necessarily indefinite Hilbert space of the fermionic sector, which implies H is really a difference of squares.