The Cosmological Lithium Problem Revisited

Abstract

After a brief review of the cosmological lithium problem, we report a few recent attempts to find theoretical solutions by our group at Texas A&M University (Commerce & College Station). We will discuss our studies on the theoretical description of electron screening, the possible existence of parallel universes of dark matter, and the use of non-extensive statistics during the Big Bang nucleosynthesis epoch. Last but not least, we discuss possible solutions within nuclear physics realm. The impact of recent measurements of relevant nuclear reaction cross sections for the Big Bang nucleosynthesis based on indirect methods is also assessed. Although our attempts may not able to explain the observed discrepancies between theory and observations, they suggest theoretical developments that can be useful also for stellar nucleosynthesis.

10 pages, 4 figures. Plenary talk at the XI Latin American Symposium on Nuclear Physics and Applications, Medellin, Colombia, 30 November - 4 December 2015. AIP conference proceedings, to be published

References in corpus (9)

• Dark Matter Candidates from Particle Physics and Methods of Detection
• Primordial Nucleosynthesis in the Precision Cosmology Era
• The Primordial Lithium Problem
• The moment of truth for WIMP Dark Matter
• The lithium isotopic ratio in very metal-poor stars
• Big Bang nucleosynthesis revisited via Trojan Horse Method measurements
• The electron screening puzzle and nuclear clustering
• Extension of thermonuclear functions through the pathway model including Maxwell-Boltzmann and Tsallis distributions
• Electron screening and its effects on Big-Bang nucleosynthesis

Cited by in corpus (1)

• ${}^7$Be and ${}^7$Li nuclei within the no-core shell model with continuum