Trans-Planckian Censorship and Inflation in Grand Unified Theories [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1910.08837


The recently proposed trans-Planckian censorship conjecture (TCC) amounts to the claim that inflation models with an inflationary energy scale larger than Lambda_inf^max ~ 10^9 GeV belong to the swampland, i.e., cannot be embedded into a consistent theory of quantum gravity. In this paper, we point out that this constraint can be readily satisfied in D-term hybrid inflation (DHI), which is a well-motivated inflation scenario in the context of supersymmetric grand unification. In DHI, the amplitude of the primordial scalar power spectrum originates from a Fayet-Iliopoulos term of the order of the unification scale, sqrt{xi} ~ 10^16 GeV. At the same time, the TCC results in an upper bound on the corresponding gauge coupling constant of g_max ~ 10^-14. We are able to show that this constraint translates into an upper bound on the gravitino mass of m_3/2^max ~ 10 MeV, which opens the possibility that dark matter is accounted for by thermally produced gravitinos, if the reheating temperature is close to T_reh ~ 100 TeV. Interestingly enough, a somewhat similar gravitino mass range has recently been derived in a model that aims at explaining dark energy in terms of axion quintessence and resolving the Hubble tension by means of decaying gravitino dark matter.

Read this paper on arXiv…

K. Schmitz
Tue, 22 Oct 19
8/91

Comments: 7 pages + references