Thermal Goldstino Production with Low Reheating Temperatures

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.