Reheating in supersymmetric high scale inflation

Motivated by our earlier work, we analyze how the inflaton decay reheats the Universe within supersymmetry. In a nonsupersymmetric case the inflaton usually decays via preheating unless its couplings to other fields are very small. Naively one would expect that supersymmetry enhances bosonic preheating as it introduces new scalars such as squarks and sleptons. On the contrary, we point out that preheating is unlikely within supersymmetry. The reason is that flat directions in the scalar potential, classified by gauge-invariant combinations of slepton and squark fields, are generically displaced towards a large vacuum expectation value (VEV) in the early Universe. They induce supersymmetry preserving masses to the inflaton decay products through the standard model Yukawa couplings, which kinematically blocks preheating for VEVs> 1013 GeV. The decay will become allowed only after the flat directions start oscillating, and once the flat direction VEV is sufficiently redshifted. For models with weak scale supersymmetry, this generically happens at a Hubble expansion rate: H ’ 10 3–10 1 TeV, at which time the inflaton decays in the perturbative regime. This is to our knowledge the first analysis where the inflaton decay to the standard model particles is treated properly within supersymmetry. There are a number of important consequences: no overproduction of dangerous supersymmetric relics (particularly gravitinos), no resonant excitation of superheavy dark matter, and no nonthermal leptogenesis through nonperturbative creation of the right-handed (s)neutrinos. Finally supersymmetric flat directions can even spoil hybrid inflation altogether by not allowing the auxiliary field to become tachyonic.