Kavli Affiliate: Michael S. Turner
| First 5 Authors: Michael S. Turner, KICP/UChicago, The Kavli Foundation, ,
| Summary:
Big-bang nucleosynthesis (BBN), today a pillar of modern cosmology, began
with the trailblazing 1948 paper of Alpher, Bethe and Gamow. In it, they
proposed non-equilibrium nuclear processes in the early Universe ($t sim
1000,$sec) and an early radiation-dominated phase to explain the abundances of
all the chemical elements. Their model was fundamentally flawed, but initiated
a complex and interesting path to the modern theory of BBN, which explains only
the abundances of the lightest chemical elements (mostly $^4$He) and the
discovery of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The purpose of this paper
is to clarify the basic physics of BBN, adding some new insights, and to
describe how the modern theory developed. I finish with a discussion of two
misunderstandings about BBN that still persist and the tale of the
pre-discovery predictions of the temperature of the CMB and the missed
opportunity it turned out to be.
| Search Query: ArXiv Query: search_query=au:”Michael S. Turner”&id_list=&start=0&max_results=10