Supersymmetric flat directions and resonant gravitino production

Abstract

We study resonant gravitino production in the early Universe in the presence of SUSY flat directions whose large VEVs break some but not all gauge symmetries. We find that for a large region of parameter space the gravitino abundance is several orders of magnitude larger than the cosmological upper bound. Since flat directions with large VEVs are generically expected in supersymmetric theories this result further exacerbates the gravitino problem.

Comments: 5 pages, matches the published version. Minor changes in the text; references added