Informal Pizza Seminar

Particle physics catalysis of thermal Big Bang Nucleosynthesis

Maxim Pospelov

University of Victoria/Perimeter Institute

I show that possible existence of metastable charged particles (for example, long-lived stau or chargino) leads to the catalysis of certain primordial nuclear reactions, enhancing the production of ⁶Li and decreasing the production of ^7.Li If a particle has a lifetime larger than 10⁵ seconds, its abundance relative to entropy has to be less than 10^-17, which puts the tightest bound on e.g. the gravitino-LSP/stau-NLSP scenario.