A new, precise measurement of the primordial abundance of deuterium
By M. Pettini, Ryan Cooke Institute of Astronomy, U. Cambridge, Kavli Institute for Cosmology. 2012
133 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The metal-poor (Z � 1/100 Z� ) damped Lyman α system (DLA) at redshift zabs = 3.049 84 in the zem � 3.030 QSO SDSS J1419+0829 has near-ideal properties for an accurate deter- mination of the primordial abundance of deuterium (D/H)p. We have analysed a high-quality spectrum of this object with software specifically designed to deduce the best-fitting value of D/H and to assess comprehensively the random and systematic errors affecting this determi- nation. We find (D/H)DLA = (2.535 ± 0.05) × 10 −5 , which in turn impliesb,0h 2 = 0.0223 ± 0.0009, in very good agreement withb,0h 2 (CMB) = 0.0222 ± 0.0004 deduced from the angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). If the value in this DLA is indeed the true (D/H)p produced by big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN), there may be no need to invoke non-standard physics nor early astration of D to bring togetherb,0 h 2 (BBN) andb,0 h 2 (CMB). The scatter between most of the reported values of (D/H)p in the literature may be due largely to unaccounted systematic errors and biases. Further progress in this area will require a homogeneous set of data comparable to those reported here and analysed in a self-consistent manner. Such an endeavour, while observationally demanding, has the potential of improving our understanding of BBN physics, including the relevant nuclear reactions, and the subsequent processing of light nuclides through stars.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2cb5b2c3931ce4cb669fd5147ad86967daa5aad1
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- A new determination of the primordial He abundance using the He i λ10830 Å emission line: cosmological implications (2014, background): “…for which such a D/H measurement has been carried out (Pettini & Cooke 2012) – the measurements appear to converge to a mean primordial value D/H ∼ (2.5 - 2.9) × 10−5, which corresponds to Ωbh2 ∼ 0.0222 - 0.0223 (Iocco et al. 2009; Noterdaeme et al. 2012; Pettini & Cooke 2012; Cooke et al. 2014).”
- Elucidating ΛCDM: Impact of Baryon Acoustic Oscillation Measurements on the Hubble Constant Discrepancy (2017, methodology): “Precise estimates of the primordial deuterium abundance have been made in recent years using extremely metalpoor damped Lyman-α (DLA) systems along sight lines to high-redshift quasars (e.g., Pettini & Cooke 2012; Cooke et al. 2014, 2016; Riemer-Sørensen et al. 2017).”
- One Percent Determination of the Primordial Deuterium Abundance (2017, background): “…2001; O’Meara et al. 2001; Kirkman et al. 2003; Crighton et al. 2004; O’Meara et al. 2006; Pettini et al. 2008; Fumagalli, O’Meara, & Prochaska 2011; Pettini & Cooke 2012; Noterdaeme et al. 2012; Cooke et al. 2014; Riemer-Sørensen et al. 2015; Cooke et al. 2016; Balashev et al. 2016;…”
- Precision big bang nucleosynthesis with improved Helium-4 predictions (2018, background): “Until recently, the distribution of D/H observations showed a significant scatter (see e.g. Pettini and Cooke (2012)).”