English

Modified big bang nucleosynthesis with non-standard neutron sources

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2014-10-29 v1 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics Nuclear Theory

Abstract

During big bang nucleosynthesis, any injection of extra neutrons around the time of the 7^7Be formation, i.e. at a temperature of order T50T \simeq 50~keV, can reduce the predicted freeze-out amount of 7^7Be + 7^7Li that otherwise remains in sharp contradiction with the Spite plateau value inferred from the observations of Pop II stars. However, the growing confidence in the primordial D/H determinations puts a strong constraint on any such scenario. We address this issue in detail, analyzing different temporal patterns of neutron injection, such as decay, annihilation, resonant annihilation, and oscillation between mirror and standard model world neutrons. For this latter case, we derive the realistic injection pattern taking into account thermal effects (damping and refraction) in the primordial plasma. If the extra neutron supply is the sole non-standard mechanism operating during the BBN, the suppression of lithium abundance below Li/H~1.9×1010\leq 1.9 \times 10^{-10} always leads to the overproduction of deuterium, D/H~3.6×105\geq 3.6 \times 10^{-5}, well outside the error bars suggested by recent observations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1405.1718,
  title  = {Modified big bang nucleosynthesis with non-standard neutron sources},
  author = {Alain Coc and Maxim Pospelov and Jean-Philippe Uzan and Elisabeth Vangioni},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1405.1718},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

10 pages, 9 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T04:08:31.557Z