Anomaly-induced inflaton decay and gravitino-overproduction problem

We point out that the inflaton spontaneously decays into any gauge bosons and gauginos via the super-Weyl, Kahler and sigma-model anomalies in supergravity, once the inflaton acquires a non-vanishing vacuum expectation value. In particular, in the dynamical supersymmetry breaking scenarios, the inflaton necessarily decays into the supersymmetry breaking sector, if the inflaton mass is larger than the dynamical scale. This generically causes the overproduction of the gravitinos, which severely constrains the inflation models. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.