Gravitino

History

Murray Gell-Mann and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen intended the spin-3/2 particle associated with supergravity to be called the 'hemitrion', meaning 'half-3', however the editors of Physical Review were not keen on the name and instead suggested 'massless Rarita–Schwinger particle' for their 1977 publication. The current name of gravitino was instead suggested by Sidney Coleman and Heinz Pagels, although this term was originally coined in 1954 by Felix Pirani to describe a class of negative energy excitations with zero rest mass.

Gravitino cosmological problem

If the gravitino indeed has a mass of the order of 1 TeV/c, then it creates a problem in the standard model of cosmology, at least naïvely.

One option is that the gravitino is stable. This would be the case if the gravitino is the lightest supersymmetric particle and R-parity is conserved (or nearly so). In this case the gravitino is a candidate for dark matter; as such gravitinos will have been created in the very early universe. However, one may calculate the density of gravitinos and it turns out to be much higher than the observed dark matter density.

The other option is that the gravitino is unstable. Thus the gravitinos mentioned above would decay and will not contribute to the observed dark matter density. However, since they decay only through gravitational interactions, their lifetime would be very long, of the order of /m, where Mpl is the Planck mass and m is the mass of a gravitino. For a gravitino mass of the order of 1 TeV/c this would be , much later than the era of nucleosynthesis. At least one possible channel of decay must include either a photon, a charged lepton or a meson, each of which would be energetic enough to destroy a nucleus if it strikes one. One can show that enough such energetic particles will be created in the decay as to destroy almost all the nuclei created in the era of nucleosynthesis, in contrast with observations. In fact, in such a case the universe would have been made of hydrogen alone, and star formation would probably be impossible.

One possible solution to the cosmological gravitino problem is the split supersymmetry model, where the gravitino mass is much higher than the TeV scale, but other fermionic supersymmetric partners of standard model particles already appear at this scale.

Another solution is that R-parity is slightly violated and the gravitino is the lightest supersymmetric particle. This causes almost all supersymmetric particles in the early Universe to decay into Standard Model particles via R-parity violating interactions well before the synthesis of primordial nuclei; a small fraction however decay into gravitinos, whose half-life is orders of magnitude greater than the age of the Universe due to the suppression of the decay rate by the Planck scale and the small R-parity violating couplings.

References

References

1. van Nieuwenhuizen, P.. (1993). "Some personal recollections about the discovery of supergravity". International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
2. (1977). "Supergravity and the S Matrix". Phys. Rev. D.
3. (1977). "On SO(8) Extended Supergravity". Nucl. Phys. B.
4. (1955). "On the energy-momentum tensor and the creation of matter in relativistic cosmology". Proc. R. Soc. Lond..
5. (1993). "Cosmological constraints on the light stable gravitino". Physics Letters B.
6. (2005-01-19). "Brane world cosmological solution to the gravitino problem". Physical Review D.
7. (1997-07-15). "Cosmology of supersymmetric models with low-energy gauge mediation". Physical Review D.
8. M. Endo [http://susy06.physics.uci.edu/talks/5/endo.pdf Moduli Stabilization and Moduli-Induced Gravitino Problem] {{webarchive. link. (2011-07-24 talk given at SUSY'06, 12 June 2006)
9. (2000). "Gravitino dark matter without R-parity". Physics Letters B.