The Decay of the Inflaton in No-scale Supergravity

Abstract

We study the decay of the inflaton in no-scale supergravity and show that decay due to the gravitational interactions through supergravity effects is highly suppressed relative to the case in minimal supergravity or models with a generic Kahler potential. We also show that decay to gravitinos is suppressed. We demonstrate that decay and sufficient reheating are possible with the introduction of a non-trivial gauge kinetic term. This channel may be dominant in no-scale supergravity, yet yields a re-heating temperature which is low enough to avoid the gravitino problem while high enough for Big Bang Nucleosynthesis and baryogenesis.

Comments: Added the footnote in the conclusion section which discusses the constrains on the explicit inflaton couplings to the matter fields via non-renormalizable operators. To appear in JCAP