2014/05/07 by A. Coc, Alain Coc, Maxim Pospelov +2 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Annihilation #Astrophysics #Big Bang nucleosynthesis #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Deuterium #Neutron #Neutron star #Nuclear physics #Nucleosynthesis #Order (exchange) #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Supernova #astro-ph.CO #hep-ph #nucl-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.90.085018
published as Phys. Rev. D 90, 085018 (2014) · 10 pages, 9 figures
arxiv created 2014/05/07 · openalex publication_date 2014/10/20 · arxiv updated 2014/10/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
During big bang nucleosynthesis, any injection of extra neutrons around the time of the 7Be formation, i.e. at a temperature of order T\ensuremath≃50 keV, can reduce the predicted freeze-out amount of 7Be+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 nonstandard mechanism operating during the big bang nucleosynthesis, the suppression of lithium abundance below Li/H\ensuremath≤1.9\ifmmode×\else\texttimes\fi10^\ensuremath-10 always leads to the overproduction of deuterium, D/H\ensuremath≥3.6\ifmmode×\else\texttimes\fi10^\ensuremath-5, well outside the error bars suggested by recent observations.