Thermal Goldstino Production with Low Reheating Temperatures

TL;DR

This paper investigates the thermal production of goldstinos during low reheating temperatures, revealing their potential as dark matter candidates and their cosmological implications in supersymmetric models.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of goldstino production mechanisms during matter-dominated eras with low reheating temperatures, including their momentum distribution and impact on cosmology.

Findings

Goldstinos can be produced via freeze-in or freeze-out mechanisms at low reheating temperatures.

The momentum distribution of goldstinos shows a peculiar shape due to late decoupling.

Thermally produced goldstinos could account for dark matter even at reheating temperatures around 1 GeV.

Abstract

We discuss thermal production of (pseudo) goldstinos, the Goldstone fermions emerging from (multiple) SUSY breaking sectors, when the reheating temperature is well below the superpartner masses. In such a case, the production during matter-dominated era induced by inflaton decay stage is more important than after reheating. Depending on the SUSY breaking scale, goldstinos are produced by freeze-in or freeze-out mechanism via $1\to 2$ decays and inverse decays. We solve the Boltzmann equation for the momentum distribution function of the goldstino.In the freeze-out case, goldstinos maintain chemical equilibrium far after they are kinetically decoupled from the thermal bath, and consequently goldstinos with different momentum decouple at different temperatures. As a result their momentum distribution function shows a peculiar shape and the final yield is smaller than if kinetic equilibrium was assumed. We revisit the cosmological implications in both R-parity-conserving and R-parity-violating supersymmetric scenarios. For the former, thermally produced goldstinos can still be abundant enough to be dark matter at present times even if the reheating temperature is low, of order $1$ GeV. For the latter, if the reheating temperature is low, of order $0.1-1$ GeV, they are safe from the BBN constraints.