Weak interaction rate Coulomb corrections in big bang nucleosynthesis
- Department of Physics, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093-0319 (United States)
We have applied a fully relativistic Coulomb wave correction to the weak reactions in the full Kawano/Wagoner big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) code. We have also added the zero-temperature radiative correction. We find that using this higher accuracy Coulomb correction results in good agreement with previous work, giving only a modest {approx}0.04% increase in helium mass fraction over correction prescriptions applied previously in BBN calculations. We have calculated the effect of these corrections on other light element abundance yields in BBN, and we have studied these yields as functions of electron neutrino lepton number. This has allowed insights into the role of the weak neutron-proton interconversion processes in the setting of the neutron-to-proton ratio during the BBN epoch. We find that the lepton capture processes' contributions to this ratio are only second order in the Coulomb correction.
- OSTI ID:
- 21409433
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Vol. 81, Issue 6; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.81.065027; (c) 2010 The American Physical Society; ISSN 0556-2821
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Related Subjects
ACCURACY
CAPTURE
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
COULOMB CORRECTION
ELECTRON NEUTRINOS
ELEMENT ABUNDANCE
HELIUM
LEPTON NUMBER
MASS
NEUTRONS
NUCLEOSYNTHESIS
PROTONS
RADIATIVE CORRECTIONS
RELATIVISTIC RANGE
WEAK INTERACTIONS
ABUNDANCE
BARYONS
BASIC INTERACTIONS
CORRECTIONS
ELEMENTARY PARTICLES
ELEMENTS
ENERGY RANGE
FERMIONS
FLUIDS
GASES
HADRONS
INTERACTIONS
LEPTONS
MASSLESS PARTICLES
NEUTRINOS
NONMETALS
NUCLEONS
RARE GASES
SIMULATION
SYNTHESIS