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Primordial element production studied beneath a mountain

Experiments conducted deep beneath a mountain have provided the most precise measurements yet of a key nuclear reaction that occurred seconds after the Big Bang — refining our knowledge of the constituents of the Universe.
  1. Brian D. Fields

    1. Brian D. Fields is in the Department of Astronomy, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA. He is also in the Department of Physics, and the Illinois Center for Advanced Study of the Universe, University of Illinois.

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Cosmologists seek to infer the history of the Universe by using observations of today’s cosmos to glean information about the exotic physics at play during its earliest moments. The epoch of Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) represents a crucial frontier in this history. BBN is the process that produced the nuclei of the lightest elements, and started about one second after the Big Bang — the earliest time at which the known laws of physics left ‘fossils’ that can be probed experimentally1. Writing in Nature, Mossa et al.2 report measurements of nuclear reactions that sharpen our understanding of BBN, thereby allowing us to precisely measure the amount of ‘ordinary’ matter in the cosmos and potentially deepening our knowledge of the early Universe.

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Nature 587, 203-204 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03117-3

References

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