Gravitino Production After Inflation

Abstract

We investigate the production of gravitinos in a cosmological background. Gravitinos can be produced during preheating after inflation due to a combined effect of interactions with an oscillating inflaton field and absence of conformal invariance. In order to get insight on conformal properties of gravitino we reformulate phenomenological supergravity in SU(2,2|1)-symmetric way. The Planck mass and F- and D-terms appear via the gauge-fixed value of a superfield that we call conformon. We find that in general the probability of gravitino production is not suppressed by the small gravitational coupling. This may lead to a copious production of gravitinos after inflation. Efficiency of the new non-thermal mechanism of gravitino production is very sensitive to the choice of the underlying theory. This may put strong constraints on certain classes of inflationary models.

18 pages, v2: the version to be published in Phys. Rev.D; v3: matching notations with longer paper hep-th/0006179