Constraining the primordial spectrum of metric perturbations from gravitino and moduli production

Abstract

We consider the production of gravitinos and moduli fields from quantum vacuum fluctuations induced by the presence of scalar metric perturbations at the end of inflation. We obtain the corresponding occupation numbers, up to first order in perturbation theory, in terms of the power spectrum of the metric perturbations. We compute the limits imposed by nucleosynthesis on the spectral index $n_s$ for different models with constant $n_s$. The results show that, in certain cases, such limits can be as strong as $n_s<1.12$, which is more stringent than those coming from primordial black hole production.