One Percent Determination of the Primordial Deuterium Abundance
By R. Cooke, M. Pettini, C. Steidel. 2017
462 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We report a reanalysis of a near-pristine absorption system, located at a redshift toward the quasar Q1243+307, based on the combination of archival and new data obtained with the HIRES echelle spectrograph on the Keck telescope. This absorption system, which has an oxygen abundance [O/H] = −2.769 ± 0.028 (≃1/600 of the solar abundance), is among the lowest metallicity systems currently known where a precise measurement of the deuterium abundance is afforded. Our detailed analysis of this system concludes, on the basis of eight D i absorption lines, that the deuterium abundance of this gas cloud is , which is in very good agreement with the results previously reported by Kirkman et al., but with an improvement on the precision of this single measurement by a factor of ∼3.5. Combining this new estimate with our previous sample of six high precision and homogeneously analyzed D/H measurements, we deduce that the primordial deuterium abundance is or, expressed as a linear quantity, this value corresponds to a one percent determination of the primordial deuterium abundance. Combining our result with a big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) calculation that uses the latest nuclear physics input, we find that the baryon density derived from BBN agrees to within 2σ of the latest results from the Planck cosmic microwave background data.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a809cc2d3b9bbfaebb7d67ca93d8e9f2d3eb8770
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
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In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
Citations in the corpus
- Probing Galactic Halos with Fast Radio Bursts (2019, background): “…ratios – Helium/Hydrogen and especially Deuterium/Hydrogen – coupled with Big Bang Nucleosynthesis theory have provided a tightly constrained estimate for the cosmic baryonic mass density ρb = Ωbρc = 0.044h−270 (e.g. Burles & Tytler 1996; O’Meara et al. 2001; Steigman 2010; Cooke et al. 2018).”
- Neutrino physics with the PTOLEMY project: active neutrino properties and the light sterile case (2019, unknown): “030) · 10−5 [75], exploiting the theoretical ab-initio calculation of the d(p, γ)3He cross section from [76].”
- Baryon acoustic oscillations from the cross-correlation of Lyα absorption and quasars in eBOSS DR14 (2019, methodology): “…using the CMB measurement of rd or by using the Primordial-Nucleosynethsis value of Ωbh2 to constrain rd. Adopting the value 100Ωbh2 = 2.260 ± 0.034 derived from the deuterium abundance measurement of Cooke et al. (2018) and assuming flat ΛCDM, we derive the constraints on (H0,Ωmh2) shown in Fig.”
- The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: DR6 Gravitational Lensing Map and Cosmological Parameters (2023, methodology): “The prior on the baryon density Ωbh 2 we use is from updated Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) measurements of deuterium abundance from Mossa et al. (2020), but the constraints are not noticeably degraded using broader priors, e.g., from Cooke et al. (2018).”
- Cosmology Intertwined II: The Hubble Constant Tension (2020, unknown): “[13] R.”
- Combining full-shape and BAO analyses of galaxy power spectra: a 1.6% CMB-independent constraint on H0 (2020, methodology): “In this work, we impose the Gaussian BBN prior on ωb [1, 97–99] (see a discussion in Ref.”