Primordial helium and the cosmic background radiation

Abstract

The products of primordial nucleosynthesis, along with the cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons, are relics from the early evolution of the Universe whose observations probe the standard model of cosmology and provide windows on new physics beyond the standard models of cosmology and of particle physics. According to the standard, hot big bang cosmology, long before any stars have formed a significant fraction ( ∼ 25%) of the baryonic mass in the Universe should be in the form of helium-4 nuclei. Since current observations of 4He are restricted to low redshift regions where stellar nucleosynthesis has occurred, an observation of high redshift, prestellar, truly primordial 4He would constitute a fundamental test of the hot, big bang cosmology. At recombination, long after big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) has ended, the temperature anisotropy spectrum imprinted on the CMB depends on the 4He abundance through its connection to the electron density and the effect of the electron density on Silk damping. Since the relic abundance of 4He is relatively insensitive to the universal density of baryons,but is sensitive to a non-standard, early Universe expansion rate, the primordial mass fraction of 4He, Yp, offers a test of the consistency of the standard models of BBN and the CMB and, provides constraints on non-standard physics. Here, the WMAP seven year data (supplemented by other CMB experiments), which lead to an indirect determination of Yp at high redshift, are compared to the BBN predictions and to the independent, direct observations of 4He in low redshift, extragalactic HII regions. At present, given the very large uncertainties in the CMB-determined primordial 4He abundance (as well as for the helium abundances inferred from HII region observations), any differences between the BBN predictions and the CMB observations are small, at a level ⪅1.5σ.