Abstract
We review how our current understanding of light element synthesis during the Big Bang nucleosynthesis era may help to shed light on the identity of particle dark matter.
Highlights
In the late 40s and throughout the 50s a number of visionary scientists including Alpher, Fermi, Follin, Gamow, Hayashi, Herman, and Turkevich attempted to explain nuclear abundance patterns observed in the nearby Universe, such as the peculiar high helium mass fraction Yp ≈ 0.25
This initially speculative work on an era of nucleosynthesis in an expanding Universe at very high temperature T ∼ 109K developed slowly but steadily over the coming decades into what is known as the standard model of Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN)
A very important aspect of Catalyzed BBN (CBBN) is that the abundance of charged particles before they start decaying is given by their annihilation rate at freeze-out
Summary
In the late 40s and throughout the 50s a number of visionary scientists including Alpher, Fermi, Follin, Gamow, Hayashi, Herman, and Turkevich attempted to explain nuclear abundance patterns observed in the nearby Universe, such as the peculiar high helium mass fraction Yp ≈ 0.25. Before the advent of precise estimates of the fractional contribution of baryons to the present critical density, Ωb ≈ (0.02273 ± 0.00062)/h2, where h is the Hubble constant in units 100 km s−1Mpc−1, by detailed observations and interpretations of the anisotropies in the CMBR [1], BBN was the only comparatively precise mean to estimate Ωb As it was not clear if the ”missing” dark matter was in form of brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, black holes (formed from baryons), and/or T ∼ 106K hot gas, various attempts to reconcile a BBN era at large Ωb ∼ 1 with the observationally inferred light element abundances were made. Continuous theoretical efforts of this sort, and their constant ”failure” to account for large Ωb, gave way to the notion that the dark matter must be in form of ”exotic”, non-baryonic material, such as a new fundamental particle investigated in the present book
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