Primordial Nucleosynthesis in the Precision Cosmology Era

By G. Steigman. 2007

493 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Primordial nucleosynthesis probes the Universe during its early evolution. Given the progress in exploring the constituents, structure, and recent evolution of the Universe, it is timely to review the status of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) and confront its predictions, and the constraints that emerge from them, with those derived from independent observations of the Universe at much later epochs. Following an overview of the key physics that controls the synthesis of the elements in the early Universe, the predictions of BBN in the standard (and some nonstandard) models of cosmology and particle physics are presented. The observational data used to infer the primordial abundances are described, with an emphasis on the distinction between precision and accuracy. These are compared with the predictions, testing the internal consistency of BBN and enabling a comparison of the BBN-inferred constraints with those derived from the cosmic microwave background radiation and large scale structure data.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c9793838888068be1bf2c65dae09057cbddee716

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Citations in the corpus

MeV-scale reheating temperature and thermalization of oscillating neutrinos by radiative and hadronic decays of massive particles (2019, background): “08 MeV and t ∼ 200 sec), and the last approximation holds in the standard big-bang cosmology where (n/p)BBN ∼ 1/7 [29].”
SEVEN-YEAR WILKINSON MICROWAVE ANISOTROPY PROBE (WMAP) OBSERVATIONS: POWER SPECTRA AND WMAP-DERIVED PARAMETERS (2010, background): “…as a function of metallicity can be observed and the relation can be regressed to zero metallicity, which is presumed to give the primordial abundance (Gruenwald et al. 2002; Izotov & Thuan 2004; Olive & Skillman 2004; Fukugita & Kawasaki 2006; Peimbert et al. 2007) as reviewed by Steigman (2007).”
THE PRIMORDIAL ABUNDANCE OF 4He: EVIDENCE FOR NON-STANDARD BIG BANG NUCLEOSYNTHESIS (2010, background): “Although He is not a sensitive baryometer (Yp depends only logarithmically on the baryon density), its primordial abundance depends much more sensitively than that of D on the expansion rate of the Universe and on a possible lepton asymmetry in the early universe (Steigman 2006, 2007).”
FIVE-YEAR WILKINSON MICROWAVE ANISOTROPY PROBE OBSERVATIONS: COSMOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION (2008, unknown): “D1 we show the two-dimensional joint constraint on w0 and w ′ from WMAP+BAO+SN+BBN (see also § 5.4.2) with the systematic errors included.”
One Percent Determination of the Primordial Deuterium Abundance (2017, methodology): “…efforts to measure the chemical abundances of the elements that were made during the first minutes after the Big Bang, a process that is commonly referred to as ‘Big Bang Nucleosynthesis’ (for a general review of the subject, see Steigman 2007; Cyburt et al. 2016; Mathews, Kusakabe, & Kajino 2017).”
SEVEN-YEAR WILKINSON MICROWAVE ANISOTROPY PROBE (WMAP) OBSERVATIONS: COSMOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION (2010, unknown): “See Steigman (2007) for a review.”
A MEASUREMENT OF THE DAMPING TAIL OF THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND POWER SPECTRUM WITH THE SOUTH POLE TELESCOPE (2011, background): “Primordial Helium Abundance When the universe cools to T ∼ 0.1 MeV, light nuclei begin to form, a process known as big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) (Schramm & Turner 1998; Steigman 2007).”
A new, precise measurement of the primordial abundance of deuterium (2012, methodology): “We refer the interested reader to the review by Steigman (2007) for a detailed discussion.”
New light species and the CMB (2013, background): “0006 [26], and this prediction can be tested by both direct observation of helium and the detection of effects of YP on CMB anisotropies.”
Reheating predictions in single field inflation (2015, background): “A lower bound is placed on the reheating temperature by primordial nucleosynthesis (BBN) TBBN ∼ 10−2GeV [58];3 the scale of inflation is merely bounded from above (the CMB B-modes recently measured by BICEP2 [60, 61] do not yet, unfortunately, point to an inflationary signal) and can be as large as ”
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: cosmological parameters from three seasons of data (2013, unknown): “…fraction at Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) and the number of eﬀective relativistic degrees of freedom (Trotta & Hansen 2004; Kneller & Steigman 2004; Steigman 2007; Simha & Steigman 2008, see Section 4.9): Hence, in the present analysis, the helium fraction is a determined parameter given N eﬀ and…”
The Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment: Exploring Fundamental Symmetries of the Universe (2013, methodology): “In cosmology, successful synthesis of the light elements after the Big Bang [63,64] (Big Bang Nucleosynthesis) requires that there be an imbalance in the number of baryons and antibaryons to one part in a billion when the Universe is a few minutes old [65].”