QED corrections to the big-bang nucleosynthesis reaction rates

Abstract

We compute radiative corrections to nuclear reaction rates that determine the outcome of the Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN). Any nuclear reaction producing a photon with an energy above $2m_e$ must be supplemented by the corresponding reaction where the final state photon is replaced by an electron-positron pair. We find that pair production brings a typical $0.2\%$ enhancement to photon emission rates, resulting in a similar size corrections to elemental abundances. The exception is ${}^4\mathrm{He}$ abundance, which is insensitive to the small changes in the nuclear reaction rates. We also investigate the effect of vacuum polarisation on the Coulomb barrier, which brings a small extra correction when reaction rates are extrapolated from the measured energies to the BBN Gamow peak energies.

10 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (5)

• One percent determination of the primordial deuterium abundance
• The effects of He I 10830 on helium abundance determinations
• Precision big bang nucleosynthesis with improved Helium-4 predictions
• Microscopic calculation of the 3He(alpha,gamma)7Be and 3H(alpha,gamma)7Li capture cross sections using realistic interactions
• Bayesian Estimation of Thermonuclear Reaction Rates

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Neutrino decoupling including flavour oscillations and primordial nucleosynthesis
• A new tension in the cosmological model from primordial deuterium?
• LINX: A Fast, Differentiable, and Extensible Big Bang Nucleosynthesis Package
• Constraints on millicharged particles from nuclear gamma-decays
• SIV Guided Resolution of the Lithium-7 BBN Problem