English

Kaluza-Klein relics from warped reheating

High Energy Physics - Theory 2008-11-26 v3

Abstract

It has been suggested that after brane-antibrane inflation in a Klebanov-Strassler (KS) warped throat, metastable Kaluza-Klein (KK) excitations can be formed due to nearly-conserved angular momenta along isometric directions in the throat. If sufficiently long-lived, these relics could conflict with big bang nucleosynthesis or baryogenesis by dominating the energy density of the universe. We make a detailed estimate of the decay rate of such relics using the low energy effective action of type IIB string theory compactified on the throat geometry, with attention to powers of the warp factor. We find that it is necessary to turn on SUSY-breaking deformations of the KS background in order to ensure that the most dangerous relics will decay fast enough. The decay rate is found to be much larger than the naive guess based on the dimension of the operators which break the angular isometries of the throat. For an inflationary warp factor of order w104w\sim 10^{-4}, we obtain the bound M3/2\gsim109M_{3/2} \gsim 10^9 GeV on the scale of SUSY breaking to avoid cosmological problems from the relics, which is satisfied in the KKLT construction assumed to stabilize the compactification. Given the requirement that the relics decay before nucleosynthesis or baryogenesis, we place bounds on the mass of the relic as a function of the warp factor in the throat for more general warped backgrounds.

Cite

@article{arxiv.0710.1299,
  title  = {Kaluza-Klein relics from warped reheating},
  author = {Aaron Berndsen and James M. Cline and Horace Stoica},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0710.1299},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

30 pages, 7 figures. Added analysis and discussions to address the referees concerns: explored the effects of different IR boundary conditions, clarified the role of the simplified toy model, discussed the dominant SUSY-preserving decay route (but still conclude the SUSY-breaking one is faster). All original conclusions still hold

R2 v1 2026-06-21T09:27:36.071Z