November 10, 1999
The excessive production of gravitinos in the early universe destroys the successful predictions of nucleosynthesis. The thermal generation of gravitinos after inflation leads to the bound on the reheating temperature, T_{RH}< 10^9 GeV. However, it has been recently realized that the non-thermal generation of gravitinos in the early universe can be extremely efficient and overcome the thermal production by several orders of magnitude, leading to much tighter constraints on the reheating temperature. In this paper, we first investigate some aspects of the thermal production of gravitinos, taking into account that in fact reheating is not instantaneous and inflation is likely to be followed by a prolonged stage of coherent oscillations of the inflaton field. We then proceed by further investigating the non-thermal generation of gravitinos, providing the necessary tools to study this process in a generic time-dependent background with any number of superfields. We also present the first numerical results regarding the non-thermal generation of gravitinos in particular supersymmetric models.
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November 23, 2001
The success of primordial nucleosynthesis imposes stringent bounds on the abundance of gravitational relics. This is particularly true for gravitinos, which - for models with gravitationally mediated supersymmetry breaking - are expected to have a mass below the TeV scale and thus to decay only after nucleosynthesis has concluded. We discuss the nonthermal production of gravitinos in models with several chiral fields, to be able to distinguish the mechanisms of supersymmetry ...
July 27, 1999
Many models of supersymmetry breaking, in the context of either supergravity or superstring theories, predict the presence of particles with weak scale masses and Planck-suppressed couplings. Typical examples are the scalar moduli and the gravitino. Excessive production of such particles in the early Universe destroys the successful predictions of nucleosynthesis. In particular, the thermal production of these relics after inflation leads to a bound on the reheating temperatu...
February 21, 2001
We explicitly calculate nonthermal gravitino production during the preheating period in the inflationary Universe. Contrary to earlier investigations, we consider a two--field model to separate the mechanisms of supersymmetry breaking and inflation. We show that the superpartner of the inflaton is significantly generated, while the gravitino production is considerably smaller. Nonthermal production of gravitinos seems thus less worrisome than recently claimed.
August 11, 2016
We study the production of spin 1/2 gravitinos in a thermal Universe. Taking into account supersymmetry breaking due to the finite thermal energy density of the Universe, there is a large enhancement in the cross section of production of these gravitino states. We consider gravitinos with zero temperature masses of 0.1 eV, 1 keV, 100 GeV and 30 TeV as representative of gauge mediated, gravity mediated and anomaly mediated supersymmetry breaking scenarios. We find that the abu...
January 14, 2007
We reconsider thermal production of gravitinos in the early universe, adding to previously considered 2 -> 2 gauge scatterings: a) production via 1 -> 2 decays, allowed by thermal masses; b) the effect of the top Yukawa coupling; c) a proper treatment of the reheating process. Our final result behaves physically (larger couplings give a larger rate) and is twice larger than previous results, implying e.g. a twice stronger constraint on the reheating temperature. Accessory res...
August 21, 2012
In supersymmetric models of warm inflation, the large temperature of the radiation bath produced by the dissipative motion of the inflaton field may induce a significant thermal abundance of potentially dangerous gravitinos. While previous discussions of this problem focused on gravitino production only at the end of warm inflation, similarly to conventional reheating scenarios, we study the full evolution of the gravitino abundance during and after inflation for simple monom...
July 19, 2001
We consider the potential problems due to the production of inflatinos and gravitinos after inflation. Inflationary models with a single scale set by the microwave background anisotropies have a low enough reheat temperature to avoid problems with the thermal production of gravitinos. Moreover, the nonthermal production of gravitinos has been shown to be sufficiently small if the sector ultimately responsible for supersymmetry breaking is coupled only gravitationally to the i...
September 13, 2005
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...
December 17, 2015
We revisit gravitino production following inflation. As a first step, we review the standard calculation of gravitino production in the thermal plasma formed at the end of post-inflationary reheating when the inflaton has completely decayed. Next we consider gravitino production prior to the completion of reheating, assuming that the inflaton decay products thermalize instantaneously while they are still dilute. We then argue that instantaneous thermalization is in general a ...
November 10, 2010
The warm inflation paradigm considers the continuous production of radiation during inflation due to dissipative effects. In its strong dissipation limit, warm inflation gives way to a radiation dominated Universe. High scale inflation then yields a high reheating temperature, which then poses a severe gravitino overproduction problem for the supersymmetric realisations of warm inflation. In this paper we show that in certain class of supersymmetric models the dissipative dyn...