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Nuclear Kinetic Equilibrium During Big Bang Nucleosynthesis
- Publication Year :
- 2018
-
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.<br />Comment: 10 pages, extended comparison to Sasankan et al
Details
- Database :
- arXiv
- Publication Type :
- Report
- Accession number :
- edsarx.1811.04932
- Document Type :
- Working Paper