Light Gravitinos at Colliders and Implications for Cosmology
  Light gravitinos, with mass in the eV to MeV range, are well-motivated in
particle physics, but their status as dark-matter candidates is muddled by
early-Universe uncertainties. We investigate how upcoming data from colliders
may clarify this picture. Light gravitinos are produced primarily in the decays
of the next-to-lightest supersymmetric particle, resulting in spectacular
signals, including di-photons, delayed and non-pointing photons, kinked charged
tracks, and heavy metastable charged particles. We find that the Tevatron with
20/fb and the 7 TeV LHC with 1/fb may both see evidence for hundreds of
light-gravitino events. Remarkably, this collider data is also well suited to
distinguish between currently viable light-gravitino scenarios, with striking
implications for structure formation, inflation, and other early-Universe
cosmology.
