TY  - JOUR
AU  - Depta, Paul Frederik
AU  - Hufnagel, Marco
AU  - Schmidt-Hoberg, Kai
TI  - Updated BBN constraints on electromagnetic decays of MeV-scale particles
JO  - Journal of cosmology and astroparticle physics
VL  - 04
IS  - 04
SN  - 1475-7508
CY  - London
PB  - IOP
M1  - PUBDB-2022-00387
M1  - arXiv:2011.06519
M1  - DESY-20-160
M1  - ULB-TH/20-15
SP  - 011
PY  - 2021
N1  - JCAP 04, 011 (2021). 26 pages, 11 figures, inverse decays; v2: minor changes, conclusions unchanged, matches published version
AB  - In this work, we revise and update model-independent constraints from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis on MeV-scale particles ϕ which decay into photons and/or electron-positron pairs. We use the latest determinations of primordial abundances and extend the analysis in [1] by including all spin-statistical factors as well as inverse decays, significantly strengthening the resulting bounds in particular for small masses. For a very suppressed initial abundance of ϕ, these effects become ever more important and we find that even a pure `freeze-in' abundance can be significantly constrained. In parallel to this article, we release the public code which numerically solves the reaction network necessary to evaluate the effect of photodisintegration on the final light element abundances. As an interesting application, we re-evaluate a possible solution of the lithium problem due to the photodisintegration of beryllium and find that e.g. an ALP produced via freeze-in can lead to a viable solution.
KW  - nucleosynthesis: big bang (INSPIRE)
KW  - electromagnetic decay (INSPIRE)
KW  - electron positron (INSPIRE)
KW  - suppression (INSPIRE)
KW  - beryllium (INSPIRE)
KW  - network (INSPIRE)
KW  - lithium (INSPIRE)
KW  - photon: energy (INSPIRE)
KW  - energy dependence (INSPIRE)
KW  - elements: production (INSPIRE)
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
UR  - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:000644501000023
DO  - DOI:10.1088/1475-7516/2021/04/011
UR  - https://bib-pubdb1.desy.de/record/473969
ER  -