Cosmological issues of the gravitino production by the decay of a heavy scalar field $X$ are examined, assuming that the damped coherent oscillation of the scalar once dominated the energy of the universe. The coupling of the scalar field to a gravitino pair is estimated both in spontaneous and explicit supersymmetry breaking scenarios, with the result that it is proportional to the vacuum expectation value of the scalar field in general. Cosmological constraints depend on whether the gravitino is stable or not, and we study each case separately. For the unstable gravitino with $M_{3/2}\sim 100\mathrm{GeV}–10\mathrm{TeV}$, we obtain not only the upper bound, but also the lower bound on the reheating temperature after the $X$ decay, in order to retain the success of the big-bang nucleosynthesis. It is also shown that it severely constrains the decay rate into the gravitino pair. For the stable gravitino, similar but less stringent bounds are obtained to escape the overclosure by the gravitinos produced at the $X$ decay. The requirement that the free-streaming effect of such gravitinos should not suppress the cosmic structures at small scales eliminates some regions in the parameter space, but still opens a new window for the gravitino warm dark matter. Implications of these results to inflation models are discussed. In particular, it is shown that modular inflation will face serious cosmological difficulty when the gravitino is unstable, whereas it can escape the constraints for the stable gravitino. A similar argument offers a solution to the cosmological moduli problem, in which the moduli is relatively heavy while the gravitino is light.

• Received 24 April 2006

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.74.023520