Thermal and Non-Thermal Production of Gravitinos in the Early Universe

We present a new scenario of gravitino dark matter which is compatible with the thermal leptogenesis. We confirm by an explicit calculation in supergravity that the relic abundance of thermally produced gravitino becomes insensitive to the reheating temperature once the temperature of the Universe exceeds the mass scale of the messenger fields. In such a situation, the correct baryon to dark matter ratio can be obtained by thermal leptogenesis when the reheating temperature a...

In general the gravitino mass and/or the soft supersymmetry breaking masses in the observable sector can be much larger than the TeV scale. Depending on the relation between the masses, new important channels for gravitino production in the early Universe can arise. Gravitinos with a mass above 50 TeV decay before big bang nucleosynthesis, which leads to relaxation of the well known bound on the reheating temperature $T_{\rm R} \leq 10^{10}$ GeV. However, if the heavy graviti...

Supergravity embedding of the Standard Model of particle physics provides phenomenologically well-motivated and observationally viable inflationary scenarios. We investigate a class of inflationary models based on the superconformal framework of supergravity and discuss constraints from the reheating temperature, with the particular focus on the gravitino problem inherent in these scenarios. We point out that a large part of the parameter space within the latest BICEP/Keck 95...

We investigate the light gravitino regeneration rate in the early Universe in models based on $N=1$ supergravity. Motivated by a recent claim by Fischler, we evaluate finite-temperature effects on the gravitino regeneration rate due to the hot primordial plasma for a wide range of the supersymmetry-breaking scale $F$. We find that thermal corrections to the gravitino pole mass and to the Goldstino coupling are negligible for a wide range of temperatures, thereby justifying th...

Supersymmetric thermal leptogenesis with a hierarchical right-handed neutrino mass spectrum requires the mass of the lightest right-handed neutrino to be heavier than about 10^9 GeV. This is in conflict with the upper bound on the reheating temperature which is found by imposing that the gravitinos generated during the reheating stage after inflation do not jeopardize successful nucleosynthesis. In this paper we show that a solution to this tension is actually already incorpo...

Since the thermal history of the Universe is unknown before the epoch of primordial nucleosynthesis, the largest temperature of the radiation dominated phase (the reheating temperature) might have been as low as 1 MeV. We perform a quantitative study of supersymmetric dark matter relic abundance in cosmological scenarios with low reheating temperature. We show that, for values of the reheating temperature smaller than about 30 GeV, the domains of the supergravity parameter sp...

A new mechanism is presented which can reheat the Universe in non-oscillatory models of inflation, where the inflation period is followed by a period dominated by the kinetic density for the inflaton field (kination). The mechanism considers an auxiliary field non-minimally coupled to gravity. The auxiliary field is a spectator during inflation, rendered heavy by the non-minimal coupling to gravity. During kination however, the non-minimal coupling generates a tachyonic mass,...

In this talk we present a new calculation of the gravitino production rate, using its full one-loop corrected thermal self-energy, beyond the hard thermal loop approximation. Gravitino production $2 \to 2$ processes, that are not related to its self-energy have been taken properly into account. Our result, compared to the latest estimation, differs by almost 10%. In addition, we present a handy parametrization of our finding, that can be used to calculate the gravitino therma...

Motivated by the absence of signals of new physics in both searches for new particles at LHC and for a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) dark matter candidate, we consider a scenario where supersymmetry is broken at a scale above the reheating temperature. The low energy particle content consists then only in Standard Model states and a gravitino. We investigate the possibility that the latter provides the main component of dark matter through a freeze in mechanism f...

At high temperatures, gravitinos are generated in inelastic scattering processes with particles that are in thermal equilibrium with the hot primordial plasma. We consider the regeneration of gravitinos that starts with completion of reheating after inflation. Following a consistent finite-temperature approach, we provide the complete result for the gravitino production rate to leading order in the gauge couplings. Focusing on gravitino dark matter scenarios we compute the re...