Related papers: Tritium as an Anthropic Probe
High-mass stars are expected to form from dense prestellar cores. Their precise formation conditions are widely discussed, including their virial condition, which results in slow collapse for super-virial cores with strong support by…
Lithium is an excellent tracer of mixing in stars as it is destroyed (by nuclear reactions) at a temperature around $\sim 2.5\times 10^6$ K. The lithium destruction zone is typically located in the radiative region of a star. If the…
We investigate the history of $^6$Li and $^7$Li in population II dwarfs during the pre main sequence and main sequence. The evolution is followed using the CESAM code and taking into account the most recent physics. The effective…
The cosmological lithium problem, i.e. the discrepancy between the lithium abundance predicted by the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis and the one observed for the stars of the "Spite plateau", is one of the long standing problems of modern…
Numerous recent measurements indicate an excess of counts near the endpoint of the electron energy spectrum in tritium decay. We show that this effect is expected if the neutrino is a tachyon. Results of calculations, based on a unitary…
We build on recent new evolutionary models of Jupiter and Saturn and here extend our calculations to investigate the evolution of extrasolar giant planets of mass 0.15 to 3.0 M_J. Our inhomogeneous thermal history models show that the…
Observations show that the global deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio (D/H) in the local interstellar medium (ISM) is about 90% of the primordial ratio predicted by big bang nucleosynthesis. The high (D/H)$_{ISM}$ implies that only a small fraction…
We have observed the J=3-2 transition of N2H+ and N2D+ to investigate the trend of deuterium fractionation with evolutionary stage in three selected regions in the Infrared Dark Cloud (IRDC) G28.34+0.06 with the Submillimeter Telescope…
We discuss the physics potential of future tritium beta-decay experiments having a sensitivity to a neutrino mass ~\sqrt{|\Delta m^{2}_{23}|}~5x10^{-2} eV. The case of three-neutrino mixing is analised. A negative result of such an…
Primordial or big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) is one of the three historical strong evidences for the big bang model. Standard BBN is now a parameter free theory, since the baryonic density of the Universe has been deduced with an…
The determined abundances of primordial $^4He$ and $^7Li$ provide a basis with which to test the standard model of big bang nucleosynthesis in conjunction with the other two light element isotopes $D$ and $^3He$, also produced in the big…
We have derived beryllium abundances in a wide sample of stars hosting planets, with spectral types in the range F7V-K0V, aimed at studying in detail the effects of the presence of planets on the structure and evolution of the associated…
We use thirty-eight high-resolution simulations of galaxy formation between redshift 10 and 5 to study the impact of a 3 keV warm dark matter (WDM) candidate on the high-redshift Universe. We focus our attention on the stellar mass function…
The connection between cosmological observations and neutrino physics is discussed in detail. Neutrinos decouple from thermal contact in the early Universe at a temperature of order 1 MeV which coincides with the temperature where light…
In the primordial Universe, neutrino decoupling occurs only slightly before electron-positron annihilations. This leads notably to an increased neutrino energy density compared to the standard instantaneous decoupling approximation,…
We investigate the impact of a nonstandard electron mass $m_e$ on early-Universe thermal history, focusing on neutrino decoupling and Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN). In the standard cosmology, neutrino--electron interactions keep neutrinos…
We have compared the intensity distribution of molecular line emission with that of dust continuum emission, and modeled molecular line profiles in three different preprotostellar cores in order to test how dynamical evolution is related to…
We simulated the long-term collisional depletion of debris disks around solar-type (G2V) stars with our code. The numerical results were supplemented by, and interpreted through, a new analytic model. A few general scaling rules for the…
The success of primordial nucleosynthesis as a cornerstone of the hot Big Bang model has been limited by the long-standing lithium problem. Recent work presented a self-consistent perturbative analysis of the effects of variations in…
We study the internal dynamics of an elementary quantum system placed close to a body held at a temperature different from that of the surrounding radiation. We derive general expressions for lifetime and density matrix valid for bodies of…