Thermal production of gravitinos Original Research Article

We evaluate the gravitino production rate in supersymmetric QCD at high temperature to leading order in the gauge coupling. The result, which is obtained by using the resummed gluon propagator, depends logarithmically on the gluon plasma mass. As a byproduct, a new result for the axion production rate in a QED plasma is obtained. The implications for the cosmological dark matter problem are briefly discussed, in particular the intriguing possibility that gravitinos are the dominant part of cold dark matter.