Probing the Reheating Temperature at Colliders and with Primordial Nucleosynthesis

Abstract

Considering gravitino dark matter scenarios with a long-lived charged slepton, we show that collider measurements of the slepton mass and its lifetime can probe not only the gravitino mass but also the post-inflationary reheating temperature TR. In a model independent way, we derive upper limits on TR and discuss them in light of the constraints from the primordial catalysis of lithium-6 through bound-state effects. In the collider-friendly region of slepton masses below 1 TeV, the obtained conservative estimate of the maximum reheating temperature is about TR=3times 10^9 GeV for the limiting case of a small gluino-slepton mass splitting and about TR=10^8 GeV for the case that is typical for universal soft supersymmetry breaking parameters at the scale of grand unification. We find that a determination of the gluino-slepton mass ratio at the Large Hadron Collider will test the possibility of TR>10^9 GeV and thereby the viability of thermal leptogenesis with hierarchical heavy right-handed Majorana neutrinos.