Related papers: Universes without the Weak Force: Astrophysical Pr…
Contrary to a common argument that a small increase in the strength of the strong force would lead to destruction of all hydrogen in the big bang due to binding of the diproton and the dineutron with a catastrophic impact on life as we know…
We present a brief review of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN). We discuss theoretical and observational uncertainties in deuterium and helium-4 primordial abundances and their implications for the determination of important cosmological…
There are multiple examples of gravitational losses in neutron stars and black holes. Protons and neutrons have been found to have enormous repulsive pressures that highly squeezed collapsing matter cannot overcome. The case against…
Nowadays, at least two relics of the Big Bang have survived - the cosmological microwave background (CMB) and the cosmological neutrino background (C$\nu$B). Being the second most abundant particle in the Universe, the neutrino has a…
Subsequent to the early Universe quark-hadron transition the universal baryon number is carried by nucleons: neutrons and protons. The total number of nucleons is preserved as the Universe expands, but as it cools lighter protons are…
We perform calculations of dark photon production and decay in the early universe for ranges of dark photon masses and vacuum coupling with standard model photons. Simultaneously and self-consistently with dark photon production and decay,…
We consider Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) with long lived charged massive particles. Before decaying, the long lived charged particle recombines with a light element to form a bound state like a hydrogen atom. This effect modifies the…
The recently observed Deuterium abundance in a low- metallicity high-redshift hydrogen cloud, which is about ten times larger than that observed in the near interstellar medium, is that expected from the Standard Big Bang Nucleosynthesis…
A recent proposal suggests that experimental discrepancies on the lifetime of neutrons can be resolved if neutrons decay to dark matter. At the same time it has been demonstrated that such a decay mode would soften the nuclear equation of…
Observations of clusters and super clusters of galaxies have indicated that the Universe is more dominated by baryons than ever estimated in the homogeneous cosmological model for primordial nucleosynthesis. Recent detections of possibly…
The vast majority of visible matter in our universe comes from protons and neutrons (the nucleons). Nucleon interactions are fundamental to how the universe developed after the Big Bang and govern all nuclear phenomena. The subtle balance…
The weak interaction charged current processes ($\nu_e+n\leftrightarrow p+e^-$, $\bar\nu_e +p\leftrightarrow n+e^+$, $n\leftrightarrow p+e^-+\bar\nu_e$) interconvert neutrons and protons in the early universe and have significant influence…
Neutron stars and supernovae provide cosmic laboratories of highly compressed matter at supra nuclear saturation density which is beyond the reach of terrestrial experiments. The properties of dense matter is extracted by combining the…
We show that the predicted primordial helium production is significantly reduced when new measurements of the neutron lifetime and the implied enhancement in the weak reaction rates are included in big-bang nucleosynthesis. Therefore, even…
In this paper we consider the effects on big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) of the hadronic decay of a long-lived massive particle. If high-energy hadrons are emitted near the BBN epoch ($t \sim 10^{-2}$ -- $10^2 \sec$), they extraordinarily…
Neutron stars are some of the densest manifestations of massive objects in the universe. They are ideal astrophysical laboratories for testing theories of dense matter physics and provide connections among nuclear physics, particle physics…
We re-investigate the evolution of the strongly degenerate neutrinos in the early universe. With the larger degeneracy, the neutrino number freezes at higher temperatures because the neutrino annihilation rate decreases. We consider very…
A massive particle decaying into neutrinos in the early Universe is known to be less constrained than if it was decaying into other standard model particles. However, even if the decay proceeds into neutrinos, the latter still inevitably…
For a brief time in its early evolution the Universe was a cosmic nuclear reactor. The expansion and cooling of the Universe limited this epoch to the first few minutes, allowing time for the synthesis in astrophysically interesting…
We reconsider the evolution of strongly degenerate neutrinos in the early universe. Our chief concern is the validity of the entropy conservation after the neutrino annihilation process has frozen out (so that the establishment of chemical…