The Decay of the Inflaton in No-scale Supergravity

Abstract

We study the decay of the inflaton in no-scale supergravity and show that decay due to the gravitational interactions through supergravity effects is highly suppressed relative to the case in minimal supergravity or models with a generic Kahler potential. We also show that decay to gravitinos is suppressed. We demonstrate that decay and sufficient reheating are possible with the introduction of a non-trivial gauge kinetic term. This channel may be dominant in no-scale supergravity, yet yields a re-heating temperature which is low enough to avoid the gravitino problem while high enough for Big Bang Nucleosynthesis and baryogenesis.

Added the footnote in the conclusion section which discusses the constrains on the explicit inflaton couplings to the matter fields via non-renormalizable operators. To appear in JCAP