Coulomb screening in linear coasting nucleosynthesis

TL;DR

This paper examines the influence of Coulomb screening on primordial nucleosynthesis in a linearly expanding universe, concluding that screening effects are negligible and do not alter element abundance predictions.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis showing Coulomb screening has minimal impact on primordial nucleosynthesis in slow-evolving universe models, confirming previous constraints.

Findings

Coulomb screening effects are negligible on element abundances.

Mean field estimates of screening do not significantly alter nucleosynthesis parameters.

Deviations from mean field estimates are also negligible.

Abstract

We investigate the impact of coulomb screening on primordial nucleosynthesis in a universe having scale factor that evolves linearly with time. Coulomb screening affects primordial nucleosynthesis via enhancement of thermonuclear reaction rates. This enhancement is determined by the solving Poisson equation within the context of mean field theory (under appropriate conditions during the primordial nucleosynthesis). Using these results, we claim that the mean field estimates of coulomb screening hardly affect the predicted element abundances and nucleosynthesis parameters$, \{\eta_9,\xi_e\}$. The deviations from mean field estimates are also studied in detail by boosting genuine screening results with the screening parameter ($\omega_s$). These deviations show negligible effect on the element abundances and on nucleosynthesis parameters. This work thus rules out the coulomb screening effects on primordial nucleosynthesis in slow evolving models and confirms that constraints in ref.[7] on nucleosynthesis parameters remain unaltered.