Updated Nucleosynthesis Constraints on Unstable Relic Particles

By Richard H. Cyburt, John Ellis, B. Fields, K. Olive. 2002

305 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We revisit the upper limits on the abundance of unstable massive relic particles provided by the success of Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis calculations. We use the cosmic microwave background data to constrain the baryon-to-photon ratio, and incorporate an extensively updated compilation of cross sections into a new calculation of the network of reactions induced by electromagnetic showers that create and destroy the light elements deuterium, 3 He, 4 He, 6 Li and 7 Li. We derive analytic approximations that complement and check the full numerical calculations. Considerations of the abundances of 4 He and 6 Li exclude exceptional regions of parameter space that would otherwise have been permitted by deuterium alone. We illustrate our results by applying them to massive gravitinos. If they weigh 100 GeV, their primordial abundance should have been below about 10 13 of the total entropy. This would imply an upper limit on the reheating temperature of a few times 10 7 GeV, which could be a potential diculty for some models of inflation. We discuss possible ways of evading this problem.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b9e58320abdb6035a3313ffde48962be1409769f

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

Reheating in Inflationary Cosmology: Theory and Applications (2010, background): “[89] Cyburt RH, Ellis JR, Fields BD, Olive KA, “Updated nucleosynthesis constraints on unstable relic particles,” Phys.”