Paper detail

Measurements of Nuclear Reactions that Create and Destroy Li and Be during BBN

I review measurements of the most important reactions involved in the creation and destruction of Li and Be during big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) as well as their uncertainties and the relative contributions they make to the uncertainty in the primordial $^7$Li abundance ($^7$Li/H). Examining the sensitivity of calculated $^7$Li/H to these reactions as predicted by different BBN codes I find no significant differences. I compare my calculation of primordial $^7$Li/H to some recently published values and conclude that in the absence of a major undetected experimental blunder, nuclear physics uncertainties cannot account for the cosmological Li problem. With an estimated 13% uncertainty in the calculated abundance, the discrepancy with observation amounts to some $4.6σ$.