New Astrophysical Constraints on the Mass of the Superlight Gravitino

Abstract

In some supergravity models, the superlight gravitino is accompanied by a light weakly coupled scalar (S) and pseudo-scalar (P) particle. The coupling of these particles to matter is inversely proportional to the product of the gravitino mass and the Planck mass. As a result, their emission from the stars and supernovae via the photon electron scattering reaction for certain ranges of the gravitino mass can become the dominant energy loss mechanism in contradiction with observations thereby ruling out those mass values for the gravitino. For scalar and/or pseudo-scalar masses between 10 MeV and a keV, the SN1987A observations exclude the gravitino mass range from 0.03 eV to 30 eV whereas if the S/P masses are less than a keV, constraints of stellar energy loss can exclude the gravitino masses ranging from $3\times 10^{-6}$ eV to 50 eV for the photino mass of 100 GeV. We also find that for S/P mass less than an MeV, Big Bang Nucleosynthesis constraints imply a gravitino mass larger than one eV. These are the most stringent bounds to date on the gravitino mass in this class of models.

4 pages; latex; no figures; Report No. UMD-PP-97-62; FERMILAB-Pub- 96/433-A; UAB-FT-406

Cited by in corpus (21)

• Particle Physics from Stars
• Dark Matter Candidates: A Ten-Point Test
• Categorizing Different Approaches to the Cosmological Constant Problem
• Low-scale supersymmetry breaking: effective description, electroweak breaking and phenomenology
• Signals of a superlight gravitino at hadron colliders when the other superparticles are heavy
• Signals of a superlight gravitino at e^+ e^- colliders when the other superparticles are heavy
• On the Interactions of Light Gravitinos
• Light Sgoldstino: Precision Measurements versus Collider Searches
• Signatures of massive sgoldstinos at e+e- colliders
• Axion-like particles as ultra high energy cosmic rays?
• The Cosmological Constant Problem, an Inspiration for New Physics
• Light-Gravitino Production at Hadron Colliders
• The Role of Scalar and Pseudoscalar Fields in Determining Nucleosynthesis Bounds on the Scale of Supersymmetry Breaking
• Beyond the standard seesaw: neutrino masses from Kahler operators and broken supersymmetry
• Flavour non-conservation in goldstino interactions
• CompHEP Package with Light Gravitino and Sgoldstinos
• Supernova Constraints on a Superlight Gravitino
• Gravitinos from Gravitational Collapse
• Constraints on the mass of the superlight gravitino from the muon anomaly
• Flavor changing neutral decay effects in models with two Higgs boson doublets: Applications to LHC Physics
• Astrophysical constraints on superlight gravitinos