Non-extensive Statistics Solution to the Cosmological Lithium Problem
Abstract
Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) theory predicts the abundances of the light elements D, He, He and Li produced in the early universe. The primordial abundances of D and He inferred from observational data are in good agreement with predictions, however, the BBN theory overestimates the primordial Li abundance by about a factor of three. This is the so-called "cosmological lithium problem". Solutions to this problem using conventional astrophysics and nuclear physics have not been successful over the past few decades, probably indicating the presence of new physics during the era of BBN. We have investigated the impact on BBN predictions of adopting a generalized distribution to describe the velocities of nucleons in the framework of Tsallis non-extensive statistics. This generalized velocity distribution is characterized by a parameter , and reduces to the usually assumed Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution for = 1. We find excellent agreement between predicted and observed primordial abundances of D, He and Li for , suggesting a possible new solution to the cosmological lithium problem.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1701.04149,
title = {Non-extensive Statistics Solution to the Cosmological Lithium Problem},
author = {S. Q. Hou and J. J. He and A. Parikh and D. Kahl and C. A. Bertulani and T. Kajino and G. J. Mathews and G. Zhao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.04149},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
16 pages, 4 figure