Neutralino dark matter from heavy axino decay

TL;DR

This paper explores how heavy axino decay affects neutralino dark matter abundance and cosmological parameters, especially in high reheating temperature scenarios, by analyzing decay effects and entropy production.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of heavy axino decay's impact on neutralino dark matter and cosmological bounds, highlighting entropy production's role in moderating reheating temperature constraints.

Findings

Axino decay significantly influences neutralino abundance.

Entropy production from axino decay can dilute gravitino density.

Reheating temperature bounds are relaxed due to axino decay effects.

Abstract

We consider cosmological consequences of a heavy axino, decaying to the neutralino in R-parity conserving models. The importance and influence of the axino decay on the resultant abundance of neutralino dark matter depends on the lifetime and the energy density of axino. For a high reheating temperature after inflation, copiously produced axinos dominate the energy density of the universe and its decay produces a large amount of entropy. As a bonus, we obtain that the upper bound on the reheating temperature after inflation via gravitino decay can be moderated, because the entropy production by the axino decay more or less dilutes the gravitinos.