Abstract
If supersymmetry is relevant at ordinary energies, the gravitino and possibly also the photino are relatively light particles. Observational constraints on these particles’ masses are reviewed. If the gravitino mass lies near the cosmological upper bound, ~ 1 keV, then gravitinos play an important role in galaxy formation.
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References
The standard reviews are P. Fayet and S. Ferrara, Phys. Reports 32C, 249 (1977); P. van Nieuwenhuizen, ibid., 68, 189 (1981).
The pioneering work is reviewed in P. Fayet, “Supersymmetry, Particle Physics and Gravitation,” in S. Ferrara, J. Ellis, and P. van Nieuwenhuizen, eds., Unification of the Fundamental Interactions (Plenum, 1980), and Ecole Normal Superieure preprint LPTENS 81/9 (1981).
E. Witten, Nucl. Phys. (in press, 1981) is an excellent introduction, even though Witten’s index theorem, discussed in his third Banff lecture, has cast doubt on the possibility of dynamical breaking of supersymmetry considered in that paper and by S. Dimopoulos and S. Ruby, SLAC-PUB-2719 (1981) and M. Dine, W. Fischler, and M. Srednicki, Princeton IAS preprint (1981).
S. Dimopoulos and H. Georgi, Harvard preprint HUTP-81/A022 (1981); N. Sakai, Tohoku University preprint TU/81/225 (1981); S. Weinberg, Harvard preprint HUTP-81/A047.
S. Deser and B. Zumino, Phys. Rev. Lett. 38, 1433 (1977).
H. Pagels, “The Cosmological Term and Supersymmetry,” Orbis Scientia (1981).
P. Fayet, Phys. Lett. 70B, 461 (1977).
P. Fayet, Phys. Lett. 84B, 421 (1979).
N. Cabibbo, G. Farrar, and L. Maiani, Rome preprint (1981). This article considers N = 1 global supersymmetry, in which the goldstino is a massless spinor; in this case, the photino is certainly unstable, decaying to a photon and a goIdstino. Here, we consider N=1 local super symmetry plus supergravity, in which the goldstino essentially becomes the helicity ±21components of the gravitinos, with mass (13). We will continue to assume that the gravitino is less massive than the photino; this seems plausible, since there is a reason for the gravitino to be light, but we know of no reason why the photino must be light. (Of course, if γ1/2 were lighter than g3/2 then γ1/2, being the lightest R-odd particle, would be stable and g3/2 would decay into γ + γ 1/2.)
H. Pagels and J. Primack, UCSC-TH-141-81 (1981); Phys. Rev. Lett. (to be published).
P. Fayet, Phys. Lett. 69B, 489 (1977). Cf. also S. Weinberg, Ref. 4.
G. Steigman, Ann. Rev. Nucl. Part. Sci. 29, 313 (1979).
P. Fayet, Phys. Lett. 86B, 272 (1978).
See, for example, D.N. Schramm and G. Steigman, Ap. J.243, 1 (1981).
S. M. Faber and J. S. Gallagher, Ann. Rev. Astron. Astrophys. 17, 135 (1979).
Reviewed by G. Steigman, “Cosmology and Neutrino Physics,” in Particles and Fields 1981; Testing the Standard Model ( Santa Cruz, September 1981, AIP Conference Proceedings).
V. A. Lubimov et al, Phys. Lett. B94, 266 (1980). The evidence on mν was reviewed here at Banff by Don Perkins.
J. R. Bond, G. Efstathiou, and J. Silk, Phys. Rev. Lett. 45., 1980 (1980). A. G. Doroshkevich, M. Yu. Khlopov, R. A. Sunyaev, A. S. Szalay, and Ya. B. Zeldovich, “Cosmological Impact of the Neutrino Rest Mass,” to appear in the Proceedings of the Xth Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics, Baltimore, Dec. 1980, and references therein. M. Davis, M. Lecar, C. Pryor, and E. Wit ten, Ap. J. in press (Nov. 15, 1981).
The same line of reasoning would apply to any other stable neutral light particle with interactions much weaker than those of neutrinos.
Here I have considered gravitino scattering on the W± and Z (for which M ≈ 100 GeV and there are 9 spin states so n ≈ 9T3) and used τ(T) MPℓ gI(T)τ 12 Tτ2. Cf. the discussion of ν decoupling in S. Weinberg, Gravitation and Cosmology (Wiley, 1972), pp. 534-5. Keeping the factors of π, etc., increases the right hand side of (35), but this will not change gI(Tg3/2d) if, as expected in standard models, there are few if any new particle states between mZ and ωT. Note finally that the cross section for g3/2 + f→γ1/2 +f (f = quark or lepton) corresponding to (15) is σ(g2/3→γ1/2) ≈ αs/F2 ≈ αT2/F2, which would suffice to keep g 3/2in thermal equilibrium above T ≈ 16gI(Tg 3/2d) 12 GeV even if the threshold ωT for R-hadrons were higher than this.
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© 1983 Plenum Press, New York
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Primack, J. (1983). Supersymmetry and Cosmology. In: Capri, A.Z., Kamal, A.N. (eds) Particles and Fields 2. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3593-1_18
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