STANDARD BIG BANG NUCLEOSYNTHESIS UP TO CNO WITH AN IMPROVED EXTENDED NUCLEAR NETWORK

By A. Coc, S. Goriely, Yi Xu, M. Saimpert, E. Vangioni. 2011

152 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Primordial or big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) is one of the three strong pieces of evidence for the big bang model together with the expansion of the universe and cosmic microwave background radiation. In this study, we improve the standard BBN calculations taking into account new nuclear physics analyses and enlarge the nuclear network up to sodium. This is, in particular, important to evaluate the primitive value of CNO mass fraction that could affect Population III stellar evolution. For the first time we list the complete network of more than 400 reactions with references to the origin of the rates, including ≈270 reaction rates calculated using the TALYS code. Together with the cosmological light elements, we calculate the primordial beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen nuclei. We performed a sensitivity study to identify the important reactions for CNO, 9Be, and boron nucleosynthesis. We re-evaluated those important reaction rates using experimental data and/or theoretical evaluations. The results are compared with precedent calculations: a primordial beryllium abundance increase by a factor of four compared to its previous evaluation, but we note a stability for B/H and for the CNO/H abundance ratio that remains close to its previous value of 0.7 × 10−15. On the other hand, the extension of the nuclear network has not changed the 7Li value, so its abundance is still 3–4 times greater than its observed spectroscopic value.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ed617c61ba477ba9a7462ea708283becbc3c15db

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Citations in the corpus

Precision big bang nucleosynthesis with improved Helium-4 predictions (2018, methodology): “The complete list of reactions can be found in Table 4 of Coc et al. (2012), together with the references for the values of the reaction rates.”
The Dark Matter Crisis: Falsification of the Current Standard Model of Cosmology (2012, background): “BB nucleosynthesis, which is usually reported to successfully account for the emergence of elements, has not been able to explain the observed low Li abundance (Coc et al. 2012; Famaey & McGaugh 2012).”
Near-Field Cosmology with Extremely Metal-Poor Stars (2015, background): “Recent predictions by Coc et al. (2012) yield 6Li/7Li = 10−4.6.”