Affleck-Dine baryogenesis and gravitino dark matter

The gravitino may well play an important role in cosmology, not only because its interactions are Planck-suppressed and therefore long-lived, but also because it is copiously produced via various processes such as particle scatterings in thermal plasma, and (pseudo) modulus and inflaton decays. We study a possibility that the early Universe was gravitino-rich from various aspects. In particular, a viable cosmology is possible, if high-scale supersymmetry is realized in nature...

In Affleck-Dine baryogenesis, the observed baryon asymmetry of the Universe is generated through the evolution of the vacuum expectation value (VEV) of a scalar condensate. This scalar condensate generically fragments into non-topological solitons (Q-balls). If they are sufficiently long-lived, they lead to an early matter domination epoch, which enhances the primordial gravitational wave signal for modes that enter the horizon during this epoch. The sudden decay of the Q-bal...

Effects of the unstable gravitino on the big-bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) and its implications to particle cosmology are discussed. If the gravitino mass is smaller than \sim 20 TeV, lifetime of the gravitino becomes longer than \sim 1sec and its decay may spoil the success of the standard BBN. In order to avoid such a problem, upper bound on the reheating temperature after the inflation is obtained, which may be as low as \sim 10^{5-6} GeV. For a successful baryogenesis with s...

We study Affleck-Dine leptogenesis via the L H_u flat direction in supersymmetric theories. We find that the baryon asymmetry is enhanced when the energy scale of the inflation is sufficiently low. Especially, we consider models of low scale inflation in which the Hubble parameter during inflation is comparable to (but slightly larger than) the gravitino mass m_{3/2} \sim 1 \TeV. The observed cosmological baryon asymmetry is obtained with the lightest neutrino mass m_{\nu_1} ...

We discuss gravitino production from reheating in models where the splitting between particle and sparticle masses can be larger than TeV, as naturally arising in the context of split supersymmetry. We show that such a production typically dominates over thermal contributions arising from the interactions of gauginos, squarks and sleptons. We constrain the supersymmetry breaking scale of the relevant sector for a given reheat temperature. However the situation changes when th...

Fluctuations of scalar fields produced at the stage of preheating after inflation are so large that they can break supersymmetry much stronger than inflation itself. These fluctuations may lead to symmetry restoration along flat directions of the effective potential even in the theories where the usual high temperature corrections are exponentially suppressed. Our results show that nonthermal phase transitions after preheating may play a crucial role in the generation of the ...

In this paper we point out that the cosmological baryon asymmetry in our universe is generated almost independently of the reheating temperature $T_R$ in Affleck-Dine leptogenesis and it is determined mainly by the mass of the lightest neutrino, $m_{\nu_1}$, in a wide range of the reheating temperature $T_R\simeq 10^5$--$10^{12}$ GeV. The present baryon asymmetry predicts the $m_{\nu_1}$ in a narrow region, $m_{\nu_1}\simeq (0.3$--$1)\times 10^{-9}$ eV. Such a small mass of t...

We study the implications of a large baryogenesis temperature, $T_B = O(10^{10}$ GeV), on the mass spectrum of superparticles in supersymmetric extensions of the standard model. Models with a neutralino as lightest superparticle (LSP) are excluded. A consistent picture is obtained with the gravitino as LSP, followed by a higgsino-like neutralino (NSP). Gravitinos with masses from 10 to 100 GeV may be the dominant component of dark matter.

Supersymmetric models predict a natural dark-matter candidate, stable baryonic Q-balls. They could be copiously produced in the early Universe as a by-product of the Affleck-Dine baryogenesis. I review the cosmological and astrophysical implications, methods of detection, and the present limits on this form of dark matter.

Affleck-Dine (AD) baryogenesis along a d=6 flat direction in gauge-mediated supersymmetry-breaking (GMSB) models can produce unstable Q-balls which naturally have field strength similar to the messenger scale. In this case a new kind of Q-ball is formed, intermediate between gravity-mediated and gauge-mediated type. We study in detail these new Q-ball solutions, showing how their properties interpolate between standard gravity-mediated and gauge-mediated Q-balls as the AD fie...