Inflaton Decay through Supergravity Effects

Abstract

We point out that supergravity effects enable the inflaton to decay into all matter fields, including the visible and the supersymmetry breaking sectors, once the inflaton acquires a non-vanishing vacuum expectation value. The new decay processes have great impacts on cosmology; the reheating temperature is bounded below; the gravitinos are produced by the inflaton decay in a broad class of the dynamical supersymmetry breaking models. We derive the bounds on the inflaton mass and the vacuum expectation value, which severely constrain high-scale inflations such as the hybrid and chaotic inflation models.