Gravitino Overproduction in Inflaton Decay

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Most of the inflation models end up with non-vanishing vacuum expectation values of the inflaton fields ϕin the true vacuum, which induce, in general, nonvanishing auxiliary field Gϕfor the inflaton potential in supergravity. We show that the presence of nonzero Gϕgives rise to inflaton decay into a pair of the gravitinos and are thereby severely constrained by cosmology especially if the gravitino is unstable and its mass is in a range of O(100) GeV O(10) TeV. For several inflation models, we explicitly calculate the values of Gϕand find that most of them are excluded or on the verge of being excluded for the gravitino mass in that range. We conclude that an inflation model with vanishing Gϕ, typically realized in a chaotic inflation, is favored in a sense that it naturally avoids the potential gravitino overproduction problem.