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Article Dans Une Revue Physical Review Letters Année : 2015

A loophole to the universal photon spectrum in electromagnetic cascades: application to the "cosmological lithium problem"

Résumé

The standard theory of electromagnetic cascades onto a photon background predicts a quasi-universal shape for the resulting non-thermal photon spectrum. This has been applied to very disparate fields, including non-thermal big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN). However, once the energy of the injected photons falls below the pair-production threshold the spectral shape is very different, a fact that has been overlooked in past literature. This loophole may have important phenomenological consequences, since it generically alters the BBN bounds on non-thermal relics: for instance it allows to re-open the possibility of purely electromagnetic solutions to the so-called "cosmological lithium problem", which were thought to be excluded by other cosmological constraints. We show this with a proof-of-principle example and a simple particle physics model, compared with previous literature.
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Dates et versions

hal-01115886 , version 1 (12-02-2015)

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V. Poulin, P. D. Serpico. A loophole to the universal photon spectrum in electromagnetic cascades: application to the "cosmological lithium problem". Physical Review Letters, 2015, 114, pp.091101. ⟨hal-01115886⟩
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