The baryon density of the Universe from an improved measurement of D(p,γ)3He cross section at LUNA

<!--HTML--><p><span><span><span>The talk will report about the publication “The baryon density of the Universe from an improved rate of deuterium burning”, Nature 587, 210–213(2020). </span></span></span></p> <p><span><span><span>Light elements were produced in the first few minutes of the Universe through a sequence of nuclear reactions known as Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN). Among the light elements produced during BBN, deuterium is an excellent indicator of cosmological parameters because its abundance is highly sensitive to the primordial baryon density and also depends on the number of neutrino species permeating the early Universe. Although astronomical observations of primordial deuterium abundance have reached percent accuracy, theoretical predictions based on BBN are hampered by large uncertainties on the cross-section of the deuterium burning D(p,γ)3He reaction. An experiment to improve the knowledge of this cross-section have been performed at the Laboratory for Underground Nuclear Astrophysics (LUNA) of the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (Italy), by exploiting the negligible cosmic-ray background deep underground. The results of this experiment settle the most uncertain nuclear physics input to BBN calculations and substantially improve the reliability of using primordial abundances to probe the physics of the early Universe. In conclusion, we will show that this improved cross-section lead to BBN estimates of the baryon density at the 1.6 percent level, in excellent agreement with a recent analysis of the cosmic microwave background. </span></span></span></p> <p>Passcode: 201278</p>