• Energy Research

We study the production of spin 1/2 gravitinos in a thermal Universe. Taking into account supersymmetry breaking due to the finite thermal energy density of the Universe, there is a large enhancement in the cross section of production of these gravitino states. We consider gravitinos with zero temperature masses of 0.1 eV, 1 keV, 100 GeV and 30 TeV as representative of gauge mediated, gravity mediated and anomaly mediated supersymmetry breaking scenarios. We find that the abundance of gravitinos produced in the early Universe is very high for gravitinos of mass 1 keV and 100 GeV. The gravitino abundances can be sufficiently suppressed if the reheat temperature is less than 100 GeV and $4\cdot 10^4$ gev respectively. However such low reheat temperatures will rule out many models of baryogenesis including those via leptogenesis. 8 pages, Revtex

This is a summary of the activities of the working group on cosmology at WHEPP-X. The three main problems that were discussed at some length by the group during the course of the workshop were (i) canceling a ‘large’ cosmological constant, (ii) non-Gaussianities in inflationary models and (iii) stability of interacting models of dark energy and dark matter. We have briefly outlined these problems and have indicated the progress made.