2018/11/12 by Samuel D. McDermott, Michael S. Turner, McDermott, Samuel D. +1
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Physics and Astronomy · #Complex Systems and Time Series Analysis #Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Statistical Mechanics and Entropy
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1811.04932
openalex publication_date 2018/11/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Sasankan et al, have recently claimed that there are significant deviations in the phase-space distributions of the kinetic energies of nuclei from the Maxwell-Boltzmann form usually assumed in BBN, and further, that these deviations lead to big changes in the predicted light-element abundances. Solving the relativistic Boltzmann equation perturbatively, we explicitly show that these deviations are not 20% as claimed, but rather are about 10-17 in size and hence cannot significantly alter the predicted light-element abundances. We discuss and compute two related effects: O(0.1%) corrections to the kinetic distributions of nuclei that arise from small relativistic corrections to the MB distribution and a much smaller effect, nuclear kinetic drag, which arises from the heat transferred from the EM plasma to nuclei that is needed to maintain kinetic equilibrium.