The cosmological moduli problem for relatively heavy moduli fields is reinvestigated. For this purpose we examine the decay of a modulus field at a quantitative level. The modulus dominantly decays into gauge bosons and gauginos, provided that the couplings among them are not suppressed in the gauge kinetic function. Remarkably the modulus decay into a gravitino pair is unsuppressed generically, with a typical branching ratio of order 0.01. Such a large gravitino yield after the modulus decay causes cosmological difficulties. The constraint from the big-bang nucleosynthesis pushes up the gravitino mass above 10 5 GeV. Furthermore to avoid the over-abundance of the stable neutralino lightest superparticles (LSPs), the gravitino must weigh more than about 10 6 GeV for the wino-like LSP, and even more for other neutralino LSPs. This poses a stringent constraint on model building of low-energy supersymmetry.

Cosmological issues of the gravitino production by the decay of a heavy scalar field X are examined, assuming that the damped coherent oscillation of the scalar once dominates the energy of the universe. The coupling of the scalar field to a gravitino pair is estimated both in spontaneous and explicit supersymmetry breaking scenarios, with the result that it is proportional to the vacuum expectation value of the scalar field in general. Cosmological constraints depend on whether the gravitino is stable or not, and we study each case separately. For the unstable gravitino with M 3/2 ∼ 100GeV-10TeV, we obtain not only the upper bound, but also the lower bound on the reheating temperature after the X decay, in order to retain the success of the big-bang nucleosynthesis. It is also shown that it severely constrains the decay rate into the gravitino pair. For the stable gravitino, similar but less stringent bounds are obtained to escape the overclosure by the gravitinos produced at the X decay. The requirement that the free-streaming effect of such gravitinos should not suppress the cosmic structures at small scales eliminates some regions in the parameter space, but still leaves a new window of the gravitino warm dark matter. Implications of these results to inflation models are discussed. In particular, it is shown that modular inflation will face serious cosmological difficulty when the gravitino is unstable, whereas it can escape the constraints for the stable gravitino. A similar argument offers a solution to the cosmological moduli problem, in which the moduli is relatively heavy while the gravitino is light.

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Although the mirage mediation is one of the most plausible mediation mechanisms of supersymmetry breaking, it suffers from two crucial problems. One is the µ-/Bµ-problem and the second is the cosmological one. The former stems from the fact that the B parameter tends to be comparable with the gravitino mass, which is two order of magnitude larger than the other soft masses. The latter problem is caused by the decay of the modulus whose branching ratio into the gravitino pair is sizable. In this paper, we propose a model of mirage mediation, in which Peccei-Quinn symmetry is incorporated. In this axionic mirage mediation, it is shown that the Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking scale is dynamically determined around 10 10 GeV to 10 12 GeV due to the supersymmetry breaking effects, and the µ-problem can be solved naturally. Furthermore, in our model, the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP) is the axino, that is the superpartner of the axion. The overabundance of the LSPs due to decays of modulus/gravitino, which is the most serious cosmological difficulty in the mirage mediation, can be avoided if the axino is sufficiently light. The next-LSPs (NLSPs) produced by the gravitino decay eventually decay into the axino LSPs, yielding the dominant component of the axinos remaining today. It is shown that the axino with the mass of O(100) MeV is naturally realized, which can constitute the dark matter of the Universe, with the free-streaming length of the order of 0.1 Mpc. The saxion, the real scalar component of the axion supermultiplet, can also be cosmologically harmless due to the dilution of the modulus decay. The lifetime of NLSP is relatively long, but much shorter than 1 sec., when the big-bang nucleosynthesis commences. The decay of NLSP would provide intriguing collider signatures.

We discuss the sparticle mass patterns that can be realized in deflected mirage mediation scenario of supersymmetry breaking, in which the moduli, anomaly, and gauge mediations all contribute to the MSSM soft parameters. Analytic expression of low energy soft parameters and also the sfermion mass sum rules are derived, which can be used to interpret the experimentally measured sparticle masses within the framework of the most general mixed moduli-gauge-anomaly mediation.Phenomenological aspects of some specific examples are also discussed.