Gravitino overproduction in inflaton decay

Abstract

Most of the inflation models end up with non-vanishing vacuum expectation values of the inflaton fields \phi in the true vacuum, which induce, in general, nonvanishing auxiliary field G_\phi for the inflaton potential in supergravity. We show that the presence of nonzero G_\phi gives rise to inflaton decay into a pair of the gravitinos and are thereby severely constrained by cosmology especially if the gravitino is unstable and its mass is in a range of O(100) GeV \sim O(10) TeV. For several inflation models, we explicitly calculate the values of G_\phi and find that most of them are excluded or on the verge of being excluded for the gravitino mass in that range. We conclude that an inflation model with vanishing G_\phi, typically realized in a chaotic inflation, is favored in a sense that it naturally avoids the potential gravitino overproduction problem.