Antimatter Regions in the Early Universe and Big Bang Nucleosynthesis
arXiv:astro-ph/0006448 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.62.103508
Abstract
We have studied big bang nucleosynthesis in the presence of regions of antimatter. Depending on the distance scale of the antimatter region, and thus the epoch of their annihilation, the amount of antimatter in the early universe is constrained by the observed abundances. Small regions, which annihilate after weak freezeout but before nucleosynthesis, lead to a reduction in the 4He yield, because of neutron annihilation. Large regions, which annihilate after nucleosynthesis, lead to an increased 3He yield. Deuterium production is also affected but not as much. The three most important production mechanisms of 3He are 1) photodisintegration of 4He by the annihilation radiation, 2) pbar-4He annihilation, and 3) nbar-4He annihilation by "secondary" antineutrons produced in anti-4He annihilation. Although pbar-4He annihilation produces more 3He than the secondary nbar-4He annihilation, the products of the latter survive later annihilation much better, since they are distributed further away from the annihilation zone.
15 pages, 9 figures. Minor changes to match the PRD version
References in corpus (6)
- Primordial Nucleosynthesis: Theory and Observations
- Lithium-6: A Probe of the Early Universe
- Search for antihelium in cosmic rays
- Possible Origin of Antimatter Regions in the Baryon Dominated Universe
- Constraining Antimatter Domains in the Early Universe with Big Bang Nucleosynthesis
- Antiproton annihilation on light nuclei at very low energies
Cited by in corpus (14)
- Primordial Nucleosynthesis: from precision cosmology to fundamental physics
- Introducing the Dirac-Milne universe
- Cosmological Constraints on Decoupled Dark Photons and Dark Higgs
- Telling Three from Four Neutrinos with Cosmology
- Magnetogenesis and the dynamics of internal dimensions
- Big Bang nucleosynthesis, matter-antimatter regions, extra relativistic species, and relic gravitational waves
- Real-time Chern-Simons term for hypermagnetic fields
- Antimatter as Macroscopic Dark Matter
- Primordial space-time foam as an origin of cosmological matter-antimatter asymmetry
- Hypermagnetic gyrotropy, inflation and the baryon asymmetry of the Universe
- Baryogenesis, magnetogenesis and the strength of anomalous interactions
- Determination of Omega_b From Big Bang Nucleosynthesis in the Presence of Regions of Antimatter
- Diffusion coefficients and constraints on hadronic inhomogeneities in the early universe
- Does inhomogeneous big bang nucleosynthesis produce an inhomogeneous element distribution today?