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arXiv · 1811.04932

Nuclear Kinetic Equilibrium During Big Bang Nucleosynthesis

Samuel D. McDermott·Michael S. Turner
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Abstract

Sasankan et al, have recently claimed that there are significant deviations in the phase-space distributions of the kinetic energies of nuclei from the Maxwell-Boltzmann form usually assumed in BBN, and further, that these deviations lead to big changes in the predicted light-element abundances. Solving the relativistic Boltzmann equation perturbatively, we explicitly show that these deviations are not 20% as claimed, but rather are about 10^-17 in size and hence cannot significantly alter the predicted light-element abundances. We discuss and compute two related effects: O(0.1%) corrections to the kinetic distributions of nuclei that arise from small relativistic corrections to the MB distribution and a much smaller effect, nuclear kinetic drag, which arises from the heat transferred from the EM plasma to nuclei that is needed to maintain kinetic equilibrium.

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Samuel D. McDermott, Michael S. Turner. 2018-11-12. Nuclear Kinetic Equilibrium During Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.04932

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