Related papers: Nucleosynthesis in Hot and Dense Media
Within the first 20 minutes of the evolution of the hot, dense, early Universe, astrophysically interesting abundances of deuterium, helium-3, helium-4, and lithium-7 were synthesized by the cosmic nuclear reactor. The primordial abundances…
We investigate nuclear matter at finite temperature and density, including the formation of light clusters up to the alpha particle The novel feature of this work is to include the formation of clusters as well as their dissolution due to…
We present a model-independent reconstruction of the early expansion and thermal histories of the universe, obtained from light element abundance measurements. The expansion history is tightly constrained around the onset of the Big Bang…
The effect of nucleon-nucleon correlations in symmetric nuclear matter at finite temperature is studied beyond BCS theory. Starting from a Hartree-Fock description of nuclear matter with the Gogny effective interaction, we add correlations…
The huge neutrino pulse that occurs during the collapse of a massive stellar core, is expected to contribute to the origination of a number of isotopes both of light chemical elements and heavy ones. It is shown that, in general, the…
Within the standard models of particle physics and cosmology we have calculated the big-bang prediction for the primordial abundance of \he to a theoretical uncertainty of less than $0.1 \pct$ $(\delta Y_P < \pm 0.0002)$, improving the…
Primordial nucleosynthesis is considered a success story of the standard big bang (SBB) cosmology. The cosmological and elementary particle physics parameters are believed to be severely constrained by the requirement of correct abundances…
In the primordial Universe, neutrino decoupling occurs only slightly before electron-positron annihilations, leading to an increased neutrino energy density with order $10^{-2}$ spectral distortions compared to the standard instantaneous…
A neutron star in a long-lived, low-mass binary can easily accrete enough matter to replace its entire crust. Previous authors noted that an accreted crust, being formed from the burning of accreted hydrogen and helium, allows a series of…
Primordial nucleosynthesis is a success story of the standard big bang (SBB) cosmology. We explore nucleosynthesis in possible models very different from SBB in which the cosmological scale factor increases linearly with time right through…
In the first stages of inflationary reheating, the temperature of the radiation produced by inflaton decays is typically higher than the commonly defined reheating temperature $T_{RH} \sim (\Gamma_\phi M_P)^{1/2}$ where $\Gamma_\phi$ is the…
Several different processes could be changing the density in the core of a neutron star, leading to a departure from $\beta$ equilibrium, quantified by the chemical potential difference $\delta\mu\equiv\mu_n-\mu_p-\mu_e$. The evolution of…
Neutrinos play an important role in compact star astrophysics: neutrino-heating is one of the main ingredients in core-collapse supernovae, neutrino-matter interactions determine the composition of matter in binary neutron star mergers and…
Primordial nucleosynthesis is inevitable during the early evolution of an expanding universe filled with radiation and matter (baryons). However, the precise abundance yields depend sensitively on the baryon density, the radiation content…
Different methods to extract the temperature and density in heavy ion collisions are compared using a statistical model tailored to reproduce many experimental features at low excitation energy. The model assumes a sequential decay of an…
We explore the dependence of pre-supernova evolution and supernova nucleosynthesis yields on the uncertainties in helium burning reaction rates. Using the revised solar abundances of Lodders (2003) for the initial stellar composition,…
Primordial nucleosynthesis is rightly hailed as one of the great successes of the standard cosmological model. Here we consider the initial forging of elements in the recently proposed Rh = ct universe, a cosmology that demands linear…
The present paper completes a series of our works on non-thermal nuclear processes in big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) started in JCAP05(2008)010 (Part I) and 05(2009)001 (Part II). The processes are triggered by non-Maxwellian particles…
We derive here a robust bound on the effective number of neutrinos from constraints on primordial nucleosynthesis yields of deuterium and helium. In particular, our results are based on very weak assumptions on the astrophysical…
As the early universe expands and cools the rates of the weak interactions that keep neutrinos in thermal equilibrium with the matter and the related rates of the reactions that inter-convert neutrons and protons decrease. Eventually, these…