Related papers: Moduli Decays and Gravitinos
In recent years it has been realised that pre-BBN decays of moduli can be a significant source of dark matter production, giving a `non-thermal WIMP miracle' and substantially reduced fine-tuning in cosmological axion physics. We study…
Many models of supersymmetry breaking, in the context of either supergravity or superstring theories, predict the presence of particles with Planck-suppressed couplings and masses around the weak scale. These particles are generically…
Moduli fields are generally present in superstring--inspired models. They are typically characterized by masses of the order of the supersymmetry breaking scale and by interactions of gravitational strength to ordinary matter. If stable,…
We review some aspects of moduli in string theory. We argue that one should focus on {\it approximate moduli spaces}, and that there is evidence that such spaces exist non-perturbatively. We ask what it would mean for string theory to…
We study the spectrum, couplings and cosmological and astrophysical implications of the moduli fields for the class of Calabi-Yau IIB string compactifications for which moduli stabilisation leads to an exponentially large volume V ~ 10^{15}…
We show that gravitinos produced by decays of a supersymmetry breaking scalar field (the pseudo-moduli field) can naturally explain the observed abundance of dark matter in a certain class of the gauge mediation models. We study the decay…
Scalar decay into gravitinos is studied in the presence of D-term supersymmetry (SUSY) breaking. The gravitinos produced by the decay of coherent oscillations of scalar fields, such as moduli and inflatons, cause cosmological problems. We…
We have recently shown that, if the inflaton has a nonzero vacuum expectation value, it generically couples to any matter fields that appear in the superpotential at the tree level, and to any gauge sectors through anomalies in the…
It is tempting to inflate along one of the many flat directions that arise in supersymmetric theories. The required flatness of the potential to obtain sufficient inflation and to not overproduce density fluctuations occurs naturally.…
In string/M-theory with a large compactification radius, some axion-like moduli can be much lighter than the gravitino. Generic moduli in gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking models also have a mass far below the weak scale. Motivated by…
Recent developments in string theory have led to "realistic" string compactifications which lead to moduli stabilization while generating a hierarchy between the Electroweak and Planck scales at the same time. However, this seems to suggest…
The generic expectation in string/supergravity models is that there are multiple moduli fields with masses of the order of the supersymmetry breaking scale. We study the cosmology that arises as a result of vacuum misalignment of these…
We consider cosmological scenarios in which density perturbations are generated by the quantum fluctuations of the inflaton field at early times; the late time dynamics involves a modulus which first dominates the energy density of the…
Moduli, modulini and the gravitino have gravitational-strength interactions, and thermal collisions after reheating create all of them with roughly the same abundance. With their mass of order $100\GeV$, corresponding to gravity-mediated…
Many models of supersymmetry breaking involve particles with weak scale mass and Planck mass suppressed couplings. Coherent production of such particles in the early universe destroys the successful predictions of nucleosynthesis. We show…
The warm inflation paradigm considers the continuous production of radiation during inflation due to dissipative effects. In its strong dissipation limit, warm inflation gives way to a radiation dominated Universe. High scale inflation then…
We discuss the mechanism of reheating in pre-big bang string cosmology and we calculate the amount of moduli and gravitinos produced gravitationally and in scattering processes of the thermal bath. We find that this abundance always exceeds…
Particle production from vacuum fluctuations during inflation is briefly revisited. The moduli problem occurring with light particles produced at the end of inflation is addressed, namely the fact that some results are in disagreement with…
We point out that supergravity effects enable the inflaton to decay into all matter fields, including the visible and the supersymmetry breaking sectors, once the inflaton acquires a non-vanishing vacuum expectation value. The new decay…
Several models of inflection point inflation with the volume modulus as the inflaton are investigated. Non-perturbative superpotentials containing two gaugino condensation terms or one such term with threshold corrections are considered. It…