Confronting the Moduli-Induced LSP Problem

Understand

Moduli fields with Planck-suppressed couplings to light species are common in string compactifications.

• Decays of these moduli can reheat the universe at a late time and produce dark matter non-thermally.
• For generic moduli fields motivated by string theory with masses similar to that of the gravitino and TeV-scale superpartners in the minimal supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM), the non-thermal production of the lightest superpartner (LSP) tends to create an unacceptably large relic density or too strong of an indirect detection signal.
• We call this the moduli-induced LSP problem of the MSSM.