Big-Bang nucleosynthesis and hadronic decay of long-lived massive particles

By M. Kawasaki, K. Kohri, T. Moroi. 2004

754 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the big-bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) with the long-lived exotic particle, called X. If the lifetime of X is longer than \sim 0.1 sec, its decay may cause non-thermal nuclear reactions during or after the BBN, altering the predictions of the standard BBN scenario. We pay particular attention to its hadronic decay modes and calculate the primordial abundances of the light elements. Using the result, we derive constraints on the primordial abundance of X. Compared to the previous studies, we have improved the following points in our analysis: The JETSET 7.4 Monte Carlo event generator is used to calculate the spectrum of hadrons produced by the decay of X; The evolution of the hadronic shower is studied taking account of the details of the energy-loss processes of the nuclei in the thermal bath; We have used the most recent observational constraints on the primordial abundances of the light elements; In order to estimate the uncertainties, we have performed the Monte Carlo simulation which includes the experimental errors of the cross sections and transfered energies. We will see that the non-thermal productions of D, He3, He4 and Li6 provide stringent upper bounds on the primordial abundance of late-decaying particle, in particular when the hadronic branching ratio of X is sizable. We apply our results to the gravitino problem, and obtain upper bound on the reheating temperature after inflation.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fd28ce36aaf2d841a4eb8a653bce4045f4af4012

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Citations in the corpus

Asymmetric dark matter from leptogenesis (2011, background): “This three-body decay mode is strongly constrained by BBN because of the hadronic decays of the Higgs [ 47 , 48], implying that must decay faster than about a second if the branching fraction to three-body decays is appreciable.”
Reheating in Inflationary Cosmology: Theory and Applications (2010, background): “[88] Kawasaki M, Kohri K, Moroi T, “Big-bang nucleosynthesis and hadronic decay of long-lived massive particles,” Phys.”
MeV-scale reheating temperature and thermalization of oscillating neutrinos by radiative and hadronic decays of massive particles (2019, background): “[25]), and therefore the total number of hadrons emitted from X is almost proportional to m X .”
The landscape of QCD axion models (2020, positive): “For τQ ∼ (10−2 ÷ 10) s the decays of superheavy quarks with mQ 1TeV would affect BBN [526–529].”
Cosmological bounds on pseudo Nambu-Goldstone bosons (2011, background): “For ALP masses above a few GeV, ALP decays will produce quark-antiquark pairs that will hadronize. Hadronic cascades can dissociate nuclei, if they are happening after BBN (typical time of τ ∼ 102 s) [29, 31, 32]. Because of the large ALP relic abundance, the eﬀects of electromagnetic or hadronic ca”