No Arabic abstract
For the first time the antineutrino spectrum formed as a result of neutron and tritium decays during the epoch of primordial nucleosynthesis is calculated. This spectrum is a non-thermal increase in addition to the standard cosmic neutrino background (C$ u$B) whose thermal spectrum was formed before the beginning of primordial nucleosynthesis. For energy larger than $10^{-2},$eV the calculated non-thermal antineutrino flux exceeds the C$ u$B spectrum and there are no other comparable sources of antineutrino in this range. The observations of these antineutrinos will allow us to look directly at the very early Universe and non-equilibrium processes taken place before, during, and some time after primordial nucleosynthesis.
Primordial nucleosynthesis, or big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN), is one of the three evidences for the big bang model, together with the expansion of the universe and the cosmic microwave background. There is a good global agreement over a range of nine orders of magnitude between abundances of 4He, D, 3He and 7Li deduced from observations, and calculated in primordial nucleosynthesis. However, there remains a yet-unexplained discrepancy of a factor 3, between the calculated and observed lithium primordial abundances, that has not been reduced, neither by recent nuclear physics experiments, nor by new observations. The precision in deuterium observations in cosmological clouds has recently improved dramatically, so that nuclear cross-sections involved in deuterium BBN needs to be known with similar precision. We will briefly discuss nuclear aspects related to the BBN of Li and D, BBN with nonstandard neutron sources, and finally, improved sensitivity studies using a Monte Carlo method that can be used in other sites of nucleosynthesis.
Primordial or big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) is now a parameter free theory whose predictions are in good overall agreement with observations. However, the 7Li calculated abundance is significantly higher than the one deduced from spectroscopic observations. Most solutions to this lithium problem involve a source of extra neutrons that inevitably leads to an increase of the deuterium abundance. This seems now to be excluded by recent deuterium observations that have drastically reduced the uncertainty on D/H and also calls for improved precision on thermonuclear reaction rates.
We investigate the effect of a variation of fundamental constants on primordial element production in Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN). We focus on the effect of a possible change in the nucleon-nucleon interaction on nuclear reaction rates involving the A=5 (5Li and 5He) and A=8 (8Be) unstable nuclei. The reaction rates for 3He(d,p)4He and 3H(d,n)4He are dominated by the properties of broad analog resonances in 5Li and 5He compound nuclei respectively. While the triple-alpha process 4He(aa,g)12C is normally not effective in BBN, its rate is very sensitive to the position of the Hoyle state and could in principle be drastically affected if 8Be were stable during BBN. We found that the effect of the variation of constants on the 3He(d,p)4He, 3H(d,n)4He nd 4He(aa,g)12C reaction rates is not sufficient to induce a significant effect on BBN, even with a stable 8Be. The main influences come from the weak rates and the A=2, n(p,g)d, bottleneck reaction.
The standard model of cosmology predicts the existence of cosmic neutrino background in the present Universe. To detect cosmic relic neutrinos in the vicinity of the Earth, it is necessary to evaluate the gravitational clustering effects on relic neutrinos in the Milky Way. Here we introduce a reweighting technique in the N-one-body simulation method, so that a single simulation can yield neutrino density profiles for different neutrino masses and phase space distributions. In light of current experimental results that favor small neutrino masses, the neutrino number density contrast around the Earth is found to be almost proportional to the square of neutrino mass. The density contrast-mass relation and the reweighting technique are useful for studying the phenomenology associated with the future detection of the cosmic neutrino background.
We study post weak decoupling coherent active-sterile and active-active matter-enhanced neutrino flavor transformation in the early universe. We show that flavor conversion efficiency at Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein resonances is likely to be high (adiabatic evolution) for relevant neutrino parameters and energies. However, we point out that these resonances cannot sweep smoothly and continuously with the expansion of the universe. We show how neutrino flavor conversion in this way can leave both the active and sterile neutrinos with non-thermal energy spectra, and how, in turn, these distorted energy spectra can affect the neutron-to-proton ratio, primordial nucleosynthesis, and cosmological mass/closure constraints on sterile neutrinos. We demonstrate that the existence of a light sterile neutrino which mixes with active neutrinos can change fundamentally the relationship between the cosmological lepton numbers and the primordial nucleosynthesis He-4 yield.